Wha't the functionality of charset option in HTML files? [duplicate]

Question

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<meta charset="utf-8"> declares encoding of own file? (3 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

Every HTML file has to set up charset=XXX option. when and who will use this option value? It used for decoding when a client browser read the original file or used for encoding when generate the original file by the programmer who wrote it?

The encoding and decoding made me confused.

Answer 1

Both. The option tells the client browser what character set was used in the encoding when the file was generated, and therefore it also tells the client browser what character set to use when decoding.