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By default, on most of the linux systems  the default character set for Apache is  UTF-8.  But what if your web application requires a different character set .

Say, if  all of your sites are in Spanish Language then you would most likely  to change this to the Latin-1 character set (ISO-8859-1)  .

So, follow the below steps to  change default charset for apache

1 > For all domains

Open  the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf  file and search  for line ::

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 

and replace with  the charset of your choice for example with  ISO-8859-1

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 

if the above line does not  exists in httpd.conf file then add that line

And finally restart the apache/httpd service for the changes to  take effect.

To verify  the new default charset for apache  use the below command ::

root@vps [~]# curl -I localhost
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:40:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 15:11:54 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 111
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

2 >  For a Single domain

If you want to change the charset for only a single domain then add the code :: AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1 in  the .htaccess file under the document root for that domain.

root@vps[~]# vi .htaccess

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

:wq!

That’s all you are done.