Document.characterSet

The Document.characterSet read-only property returns the character encoding of the document that it's currently rendered with. (A character encoding is a set of characters and how to interpret bytes into those characters.)

Users can override the developer-specified encoding inside the Content-Type header or inline like <meta charset="utf-8">, such as with Firefox's View → Text Encoding menu. This override is provided to fix incorrect developer-specified encodings that result in garbled text.

Syntax

var string = document.characterSet;

Examples

<button onclick="console.log(document.characterSet);">
  Log character encoding
</button>
<!-- displays document's character encoding in the dev console, such as "ISO-8859-1" or "UTF-8" -->

Specifications

Browser compatibility