2. Choosing a Charset
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## 2. Choosing a Charset

MeshCMS is file-based, so it needs to pick up a charset to read and write files. Files are written by MeshCMS itself, but they are read by the servlet container (e.g. Tomcat) and processed by SiteMesh. For this reason, MeshCMS will use the system charset to ensure compatibility. If the charset encoding of the platform is not good for you, you can override it using the `-Dfile.encoding=`charsetname`` option in the command that launches the Java VM to run the servlet container.

MeshCMS is developed on UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 machines, but many users have different charsets and use them successfully.

A complete charset like UTF-8 is always preferable, even if you plan to use English characters only: the default charset is used extensively across all the CMS, even for mail messages sent through mail forms. If someone sends you a message in another language, it would be unreadable since the browser will translate all unknown characters to HTML entities.

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