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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?
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When you need to write a program (performing string manipulations) that needs to be very very fast and that you're sure that you won't need exotic characters, may be UTF-8 is not the best idea. In every other situations, UTF-8 should be a standard. UTF-8 works well on almost every recent software, even on Windows.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 are based on the Unicode Character Set, so they can be used to encode the same character information. UTF-8 is currently the dominant text encoding format on the web, and newer software applications often use it as the default format for plain text data (W3Techs 2017).
Since ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF-8, UTF-8 is safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way, such as / (slash) in filenames, \ (backslash) in escape sequences, and % in printf.
UTF-8 extends the ASCII character set to use 8-bit code points, which allows for up to 256 different characters. This means that UTF-8 can represent all of the printable ASCII characters, as well as the non-printable characters.
Nope, all it's there for is to tell the browser which character set to decode your response with.
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