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IANA

IANA - quick reference

IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) maintains the official registry of character encoding names used in internet protocols. When an HTTP response includes Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8, that "utf-8" label comes from IANA's registry. Each encoding has a preferred IANA name plus optional aliases.

IANA also manages IP address allocation, DNS root zones, port numbers, and media types (MIME types). For character encoding work, the relevant registry is at iana.org/assignments/character-sets. IANA names sometimes differ from common usage: the registry name for Windows-1252 is "windows-1252" (lowercase), and ISO-8859-1 is registered as "ISO-8859-1" (with hyphens). See our character sets reference for IANA names alongside MIME types.

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