Returns a string describing the current character encoding for output files. The default character encoding for output is ISO-8859-1. The current character encoding can be changed by using the setCharSet function.
:-) getCharSet();
There is 1 result
"ISO-8859-1"
The default character encoding of IS0-8859-1 was in part chosen on the basis of it being the default HTML character encoding, but it isn't!, it's actually mentioned as the default character encoding in the HTTP specification, Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1.
ISO-8859-1 made a sensible choice for the types and languages of document we produced at the time. It could easily be argued that this should be changed to UTF-8 or another Unicode character encoding.