What is Charset UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in Apache

[Patinux]

What is Charset UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 in Apache? Why is it used and what are its limitations? I'm new to apache and i want to know how to use it in ubuntu linux. Hope i find help here... Thanks!

[Patio]

What is a charset :A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks and/or storage of text in computers.

[FaMe FacToR]

ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12. The ISO working group maintaining this series of standards has been disbanded. ISO/IEC 8859 parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 were originally Ecma International standard ECMA-94. In June 2004, the ISO/IEC working group responsible for maintaining eight-bit coded character sets disbanded and ceased all maintenance of the ISO/IEC 8859 series. In the area of character encoding, ISO now concentrates on the Universal Character Set. In computing applications, encodings that provide full UCS support are finding increasing favor over 8-bit encodings such as ISO/IEC 8859-1

[SmirnOFF]

UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. It is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed. UTF-8 encodes each character (code point) in 1 to 4 octets (8-bit bytes), with the single octet encoding used only for the 128 US-ASCII characters. See the Description section below for details. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) requires all Internet protocols to identify the encoding used for character data, and the supported character encodings must include UTF-8. The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommends that all email programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8.