What text encoding should I have Safari on my MacBook set the default to? I've read different articles/posts that have each mentioned the following 3 encodings...my assumption is that they are all relatively similar/compatible? But what is the difference, and does one default encoding stick out better than the other two?
Western ISO Latin 1
Western MacOS Roman
Unicode UTF-8
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.5
I just got tripped up on this when downloading a CSV file. The CSV was encoded with UTF-8, as I believe is normal for modern systems. However, the default encoding for Safari is Western ISO Latin 1. This garbled the CSV which Safari (annoyingly) puts directly onto the page instead of simply downloading the file.
Going to Safari Settings > Advanced Tab > Default Encoding
Then set this to Unicode (UTF-8) made this CSV download work.
Of course, it will depend on the encoding used in your file, but I think most are now UTF-8, so that is what I'm going with as the default now.
I just got tripped up on this when downloading a CSV file. The CSV was encoded with UTF-8, as I believe is normal for modern systems. However, the default encoding for Safari is Western ISO Latin 1. This garbled the CSV which Safari (annoyingly) puts directly onto the page instead of simply downloading the file.
Going to Safari Settings > Advanced Tab > Default Encoding
Then set this to Unicode (UTF-8) made this CSV download work.
Of course, it will depend on the encoding used in your file, but I think most are now UTF-8, so that is what I'm going with as the default now.
It normally doesn't matter, since all web pages are supposed to tell your browser what encoding is being used, and what the page says overrides what you set in the browser. What you set as default only gets used in the very rare case where a web page is not coded properly.
All three encodings give similar results for English, but will differ a lot when accented or non-latin characters or smart punctuation are present. UTF-8 is the recommended standard for all web pages to use these days. Latin-1 and MacRoman are considered "legacy" encodings.
Which text encoding should I use for Safari?
