Default UTF-8 Charset for Text-Based Responses¶

SWS automatically appends a charset=utf-8 parameter to the Content-Type header for a predefined list of text-based MIME types.

Included MIME Types¶

The charset=utf-8 parameter will be added to responses with the following MIME types:

• application/atom+xml
• application/rss+xml
• text/calendar
• text/csv
• text/html
• text/markdown
• text/plain
• text/xml

For example, a robots.txt file will be served with the header: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8.

Rationale¶

Without this default behavior, files like robots.txt, llms.txt, plain READMEs and other text-based resources are served without an explicit character encoding. When the charset is missing, browsers and HTTP clients fall back to outdated, locale-specific guesses (such as Windows-1252 or US-ASCII). This default guessing often results in mojibake—corrupting international symbols, accents, and non-ASCII characters. Forcing UTF-8 ensures reliable, cross-platform text rendering.

The option is enabled by default and can be controlled by boolean --text-charset option or the equivalent SERVER_TEXT_CHARSET env.

Usage examples¶

Default (no flag needed, already on):

static-web-server --root ./public
# robots.txt is served as: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Disable the feature entirely:

static-web-server --root ./public --text-charset=false

Equivalent configuration file:

[general]
root = "./public"
text-charset = false

Equivalent environment variable:

export SERVER_TEXT_CHARSET=false
static-web-server --root ./public