# Supported Character Encodings

Currently the following character encodings are supported by the `mbstring` module. Any of those Character encodings can be specified in the `encoding` parameter of `mbstring` functions.

The following character encodings are supported in this PHP extension:

- UCS-4*
- UCS-4BE
- UCS-4LE*
- UCS-2
- UCS-2BE
- UCS-2LE
- UTF-32*
- UTF-32BE*
- UTF-32LE*
- UTF-16*
- UTF-16BE*
- UTF-16LE*
- UTF-7
- UTF7-IMAP
- UTF-8*
- ASCII*
- EUC-JP*
- SJIS*
- eucJP-win*
- SJIS-win*
- ISO-2022-JP
- ISO-2022-JP-MS
- CP932
- CP51932
- SJIS-mac** (alias: MacJapanese)
- SJIS-Mobile#DOCOMO** (alias: SJIS-DOCOMO)
- SJIS-Mobile#KDDI** (alias: SJIS-KDDI)
- SJIS-Mobile#SOFTBANK** (alias: SJIS-SOFTBANK)
- UTF-8-Mobile#DOCOMO** (alias: UTF-8-DOCOMO)
- UTF-8-Mobile#KDDI-A**
- UTF-8-Mobile#KDDI-B** (alias: UTF-8-KDDI)
- UTF-8-Mobile#SOFTBANK** (alias: UTF-8-SOFTBANK)
- ISO-2022-JP-MOBILE#KDDI** (alias: ISO-2022-JP-KDDI)
- JIS
- JIS-ms
- CP50220
- CP50220raw
- CP50221
- CP50222
- ISO-8859-1*
- ISO-8859-2*
- ISO-8859-3*
- ISO-8859-4*
- ISO-8859-5*
- ISO-8859-6*
- ISO-8859-7*
- ISO-8859-8*
- ISO-8859-9*
- ISO-8859-10*
- ISO-8859-13*
- ISO-8859-14*
- ISO-8859-15*
- ISO-8859-16*
- byte2be
- byte2le
- byte4be
- byte4le
- BASE64
- HTML-ENTITIES (alias: HTML)
- 7bit
- 8bit
- EUC-CN*
- CP936
- GB18030**
- HZ
- EUC-TW*
- CP950
- BIG-5*
- EUC-KR*
- UHC (alias: CP949)
- ISO-2022-KR
- Windows-1251 (alias: CP1251)
- Windows-1252 (alias: CP1252)
- CP866 (alias: IBM866)
- KOI8-R*
- KOI8-U*
- ArmSCII-8 (alias: ArmSCII8)

* denotes encodings usable also in regular expressions.

** denotes encodings available since PHP 5.4.0.

Any php.ini entry which accepts an encoding name can also use the values "`auto`" and "`pass`". `mbstring` functions which accept an encoding name can also use the value "`auto`".

If "`pass`" is set, no character encoding conversion is performed.

If "`auto`" is set, it is expanded to the list of encodings defined per the NLS. For instance, if the NLS is set to `Japanese`, the value is assumed to be "`ASCII,JIS,UTF-8,EUC-JP,SJIS`".

See also mb_detect_order()