Accept-Charset

The Accept-Charset header describes which character sets are acceptable in textual response content.

As most servers have standardized on using UTF-8, use of this header has disappeared. Since RFC 9110, use of this header is discouraged.

Overview table

Name

Accept-Charset

Description

Indicates which character sets are acceptable in responses.

Direction

Request

Negotiates

Content-Type (the character set of the media type)

List usage in

Vary

Specification

RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics §12.5.2. Accept-Charset

Syntax

Accept = #( media-range [ accept-params ] )
media-range = ( "*/*"
              / ( type "/" "*" )
              / ( type "/" subtype )
              ) *( OWS ";" OWS parameter )
accept-params = weight *( accept-ext )
accept-ext = OWS ";" OWS token [ "=" ( token / quoted-string ) ]

Examples

Prefer HTML or text/x-c, or text/x-dvi if it’s the best the server has after a 20% markdown in quality, or plain text after a 50% markdown in quality:

Accept: text/plain; q=0.5, text/html, text/x-dvi; q=0.8, text/x-c

Prefer XHTML or HTML, or generic XML with a reduced preference, or else any content:

Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml;q=0.9, */*;q=0.8

History

1. 1999-06: RFC 2616 §14.1. Accept-Charset.
2. 2014-06: RFC 7231 §5.3.3. Accept-Charset
3. 2022-06: RFC 9110 §12.5.2. Accept-Charset. The use of this header is now formally discouraged when not strictly necessary.