Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
Several people have asked how to specify the character encoding that Drupal uses. The short answer is: you can't.
Drupal uses UTF-8 for encoding all its data. This is a Unicode encoding, so it can contain data in any language. You no longer need to worry about language specific encodings for your website (such as Big5, GB2312, Windows-1251 or 1256, ...). Also, when Drupal imports external XML data (such as RSS or XML-RPC), it is automatically converted into UTF-8 (iconv support for PHP will be required for most encodings).