HTML forms character encoding

Character encoding has always been one of the most important problems of developing web pages, including forms. Due to the high variety of symbols used by the numerous languages, different character encodings have to be used.

The default character encoding used in forms created with 123ContactForm is ISO 8859-1. If using this encoding does not display special characters specific to your language, you can easily select another encoding from the Form Setup page (after you login on our site). If you want to use an encoding that we do not yet support, please contact us and we will suport your favourite encoding too.

Encodings currently supported by forms created with 123ContactForm

• ISO 8859-1 Western Europe


• ISO 8859-2 Western and Central Europe


• ISO 8859-3 Western Europe and South European (Turkish, Maltese plus Esperanto)


• ISO 8859-4 Western Europe and Baltic countries (Lithuania, Estonia and Lapp)


• ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic alphabet


• ISO 8859-6 Arabic


• ISO 8859-7 Greek


• ISO 8859-8 Hebrew


• ISO 8859-9 Western Europe with amended Turkish character set


• ISO 8859-10 Western Europe with rationalised character set for Nordic languages


• ISO 8859-11 Thai


• ISO 8859-13 Baltic languages plus Polish


• ISO 8859-14 Celtic languages (Irish Gaelic, Scottish, Welsh)


• ISO 8859-15 Added the Euro sign and other rationalisations to ISO 8859-1


• ISO 8859-16 Central European languages (Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Slovak, Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, German, Italian)


• UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format)


• Windows 1250 Central European and Eastern European (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovene, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, Albanian, German)


• Windows 1255 Hebrew

Note: If you are not familiar with character encoding, or do not know which is the best encoding for you, we recommend you to read these resources: 1, 2, 3.