HTML Guide for encoding
A character has been found in the document that is not allowed in the charset encoding being used.
The character encoding declared in the HTML differs from the actual file encoding.
The meta element with charset="utf-8" tells browsers to interpret the document as UTF-8. However, if the file is actually saved in another encoding (such as Windows-1252), validators and browsers will detect a mismatch, leading to this error. To resolve this, you must ensure the file contents and the encoding declaration match.
Recommended: Save your document in UTF-8 encoding to match your meta tag.
Alternatively, if you must use Windows-1252, update charset accordingly.
UTF-8 example (preferred):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>UTF-8 Encoding Example</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>This page is encoded in UTF-8.</p>
</body>
</html>Windows-1252 example (not recommended):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Windows-1252 Encoding Example</title>
<meta charset="windows-1252">
</head>
<body>
<p>This page is encoded in Windows-1252.</p>
</body>
</html>Summary:
- Use UTF-8 as your file encoding and declare <meta charset="utf-8">.
- Always make sure the file is saved using the same encoding you declare in the HTML.
The document has been declared to use a windows-1251 charset but the actual contents seems to be utf-8. You should update the charset to that like in this example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">The document could not be properly parsed due to malformed characters. Check the document encoding.
Ensure to escape unescaped angle brackets by using < for < and > for > in HTML.
HTML documents may contain special characters where using the raw characters could lead to errors or misinterpretation by the browser. This is common with angle brackets < and >, which are used for delimiting HTML tags. If these characters are used in textual content or mistakenly typed in an unintended manner, it can cause issues, such as unexpected tag closure or rendering problems.
In your case, the W3C HTML Validator has detected an occurrence of the characters </> which might actually be intended as a simple display of these symbols, but are misinterpreted as an incomplete HTML tag. To prevent such issues, you should escape these characters using HTML character entities like < for the less-than sign and > for the greater-than sign.
Example:
You might want to display code or a message like This is the “<tag>” example in your HTML content. The direct use of < and > can break the HTML content. Instead, use:
<p>This is the "<tag>" example.</p>If you are trying to display the stand-alone sequence </>, you should use:
<p>Saw “</>”</p>These replacements ensure the validator processes your HTML correctly without mistaking your intended display content for HTML coding errors.
Read about Normalization in HTML and CSS.
Add a meta tag specifying the character encoding in the document’s <head> section.
HTML documents must explicitly declare their character encoding to ensure browsers correctly interpret all characters. The recommended way is using the meta charset element, which should appear as early as possible within the <head>. UTF-8 is the most widely used encoding and should be preferred for web content, but based on the page content, the “windows-1252” encoding is suggested.
Example of a complete HTML5 document with UTF-8 encoding:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Character Encoding Example</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
</body>
</html>Place the <meta charset="utf-8"> tag before any content in the <head> to avoid encoding issues.