Is there any disadvantage of using: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Question

My web server serves content that is in 95% of the time just simple ascii. However in some rare cases, the content contains some German non-ascii characters.

Now I could set the content-type response header by detecting if the content contains any non-ascii characters, or I could just always set the response header:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Is there any disadvantage in doing the latter?

Solution 1

Nope, all it's there for is to tell the browser which character set to decode your response with.

Solution 2

No, there is no disadvantage -- but you'll need to spell "utf-8" correctly.

Solution 3

ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so it is perfectly safe to declare the charset as utf-8 for an all-ASCII document.

Comments

[drhender]

UTF-8 isn't wrong. datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-3.1.1 section 3.1.1.1 (Media Type) includes: > the following examples are all equivalent, but the first is preferred for consistency: text/html;charset=utf-8, text/html;charset=UTF-8, Text/HTML;Charset="utf-8", text/html; charset="utf-8" section 3.1.1.2 (Charset) states: "A charset is identified by a case-insensitive token."

[Julian Reschke]

See stackoverflow.com/posts/17934505/revisions

[drhender]

I see- the OP originally used "UTF8", which is incorrect. That definitely adds context as to why you needed to correct the spelling. I hope my note at least adds some value about what now appears to be a comment about just case differences.