.. include:: /Includes.rst.txt .. _character-sets: Character sets ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ All TYPO3 CMS websites use UTF-8 as their character set. Using UTF-8 means you have a consistent data storage and can store any glyph from any language without thinking more about charsets. .. _character-sets-frontend: Charset in frontend (advanced) """""""""""""""""""""""""""""" UTF-8 is also be used in the frontend automatically and it is recommended to use it. However it is possible to change charset settings in TypoScript. :ref:`config.metaCharset ` defines the character set of the HTML output. If this is set to another value than UTF-8, all content is converted before output although internally processed in UTF-8. This is useful for special cases like Japanese websites where they e.g. use "shift-jis" for content delivery. If :code:`config.metaCharset` is *not* UTF-8, GET / POST data *is* automatically converted from :code:`config.metaCharset` to UTF-8. .. _character-sets-database: Database field lengths """""""""""""""""""""" The TYPO3 CMS Core is compatible with UTF-8. You might however face the problem that the database field lengths of some extensions must be extended. For example, each Chinese glyph takes three bytes. So if a field is a varchar(10) and an author enters 10 Chinese glyphs only the first 3 glyphs will be stored (since they take up 9 bytes). UTF-8 is tricky in this respect because all ASCII chars take only 1 byte while European special chars typically take up 2 and asian charsets take up 3 - but some special glyphs could take even 5-6 bytes! For more information on how to set up the database to use UTF-8, please read here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-unicode.html