# Charset Encoding

There are a variety of encodings for textual data, ISO-8859-1 (Latin1)
and UTF-8 being the most popular. Unless you change `\Smarty\Smarty::$_CHARSET`, 
Smarty recognizes `UTF-8` as the internal charset.

> **Note**
>
> `ISO-8859-1` has been PHP\'s default internal charset since the
> beginning. Unicode has been evolving since 1991. Since then it has
> become the one charset to conquer them all, as it is capable of
> encoding most of the known characters even across different character
> systems (latin, cyrillic, japanese, ...). `UTF-8` is unicode\'s most
> used encoding, as it allows referencing the thousands of character
> with the smallest size overhead possible.
>
> Since unicode and UTF-8 are very wide spread nowadays, their use is
> strongly encouraged.

> **Note**
>
> Smarty\'s internals and core plugins are truly UTF-8 compatible since
> Smarty 3.1.

```php
<?php
    
// use japanese character encoding
mb_internal_charset('EUC-JP');

\Smarty\Smarty::$_CHARSET = 'EUC-JP';
$smarty = new \Smarty\Smarty();

```