The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared

Question

When I click on my form's submit button the following error message appears:

The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must to be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.

insert.html:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>insert page</title></head>
    <body>
    <h1> Insert Page </h1>
        <form action="insert.php" method="post"  enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" >
         <p>Title:<input type="text" name="title" size="40" /></p>
         <p>Price:<input type= "text" name="price" size="40" /></p>
         <p><input type="submit" value="Insert" />
         <input type="reset" value="Reset" /></p>
        </form>    
    </body>
</html>

insert.php:

<?php
    $title = $_POST["title"];
    $price = $_POST["price"];

    echo $title;
?>

I don't know where is the problem in my code. Please help me.

Some good reading: [Declaring character encodings in HTML](http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations) — Pekka, Aug 16 '12 at 22:21
Try naming you .html page to .php: `insert.html` -> `insert.php`. And name your form handling file (`insert.php`) to `insert_action.php` or something. (Not sure if it helps but I wouldn't mix `html` and `php` pages when using PHP.) — ZZ-bb, Oct 10 '12 at 13:07
Oh dear, this was an old question. Didn't notice the dates because of the new answer... — ZZ-bb, Oct 10 '12 at 13:10
You have a typo in your code. `` Should be **``** Also `` as mention down there should work for ya, as It was for me, when I had this kind of error. — Marcin, Jul 30 '21 at 21:04

score 352 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 02 '22 at 18:28

352

Add this as a first line in the HEAD section of your HTML template

<meta content="text/html;charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<meta content="utf-8" http-equiv="encoding">

Note: if any line between <head> and these meta line (Even if it's a commented note) problem will remain, so make sure you added meta line after <head> directly

edited Sep 02 '22 at 18:28

AnasSafi

5,353
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answered Oct 10 '12 at 12:58

Krishan Gopal

4,073
1
16
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6

second line produces this error in W3 validator for docytype html: `Bad value encoding for attribute http-equiv on element meta.` – yitwail Sep 28 '13 at 00:38
4

– Scott Stensland Oct 28 '14 at 21:18
2

@yitwail I just excluded the second line, and it worked. – Evorlor Nov 28 '14 at 14:29
1

I'm using firefox. I typed both of them and now it show me nothing on page. What should I do? Thanks in advance – Hendry Tanaka Dec 03 '14 at 03:44
1

Very few of us type text files in UTF-8. Most text files are in ISO-8859-1 format. Look and see what your text editor is producing, and if it is ISO-8859-1 then use – AgilePro Apr 05 '15 at 19:47
1

First meta link works beautifully: ``. – Arshin Mar 26 '18 at 19:05
`encoding` is not among the documented values of [`http-equiv`](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#pragma-directives). – x-yuri Apr 06 '21 at 20:17

score 75 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 06 '21 at 20:19

75

I had the same problem with the most basic situation and my problem was solved by inserting this tag into the head of the document:

<meta charset="utf-8">

The character encoding (which is actually UTF-8) of the html document was not declared.

More on it here, and here.

edited Apr 06 '21 at 20:19

x-yuri

16,722
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answered Sep 27 '15 at 07:08

Dragan Sekuloski

887
7
7

score 26 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 24 '19 at 06:34

I had the same problem when I ran my form application in Firefox. Adding <meta charset="utf-8"/> in the html code solved my issue in Firefox.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <title>Voice clip upload</title>
  <script src="voiceclip.js"></script>
</head>

<body>
  <h2>Upload Voice Clip</h2>
  <form id="upload_form" enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post">
    <input type="file" name="file1" id="file1" onchange="uploadFile()"><br>
    <progress id="progressBar" value="0" max="100" style="width:300px;"></progress>
  </form>
</body>

</html>

AlienWebguy · Answer 4 · 2012-08-17T17:45:08.933

21

Well when you post, the browser only outputs $title - all your HTML tags and doctype go away. You need to include those in your insert.php file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>insert page</title></head>
<body>
<?php 

   $title = $_POST["title"];
   $price = $_POST["price"];

  echo $title;


 ?>  
</body>
</html>

edited Aug 17 '12 at 17:45

answered Aug 16 '12 at 22:23

AlienWebguy

76,997
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1

Thanks, I was having a similar problem, and your answer helped fixed it (I was missing the meta http-equiv... line). – David Miani Aug 19 '12 at 02:48

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 05 '17 at 03:09

4

You have to change the file from .html to .php.

and add this following line

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

answered Mar 05 '17 at 03:09

Renjith V R

2,981
2
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This is a better/more direct/efficient to way to set the charset, if you can use this method. – andora Apr 26 '21 at 11:57

gkrogers · Answer 6 · 2012-08-19T23:15:08.463

Your initial page is a complete HTML page containing a form, the contents of which are posted to insert.php when the submit button is clicked, but insert.php needs to process the form's contents and do something with them, like add them to a database, or output them to a new page. Your current insert.php just outputs the contents of the title field, so your browser tries to interpret that as an HTML page, and fails, obviously, because it isn't valid HTML (i.e. it isn't contained in an 'HTML' tag, etc.).

Your insert.php needs to output the necessary HTML, and insert the form data in there somewhere.

For example:

<?php 

   $title = $_POST["title"];
   $price = $_POST["price"];

  echo '<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">';
  echo '<head>';
  echo '<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />';
  echo '<title>';
  echo $title;
  echo '</title>';
  echo '</head>';
  echo '<body>';
  echo 'Hello, world.';
  echo '</body>';

 ?>

That's odd. Can you post your code as an addition to the original question? — gkrogers, Aug 19 '12 at 23:16

The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared

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