We want to "explain" to the web server that all html documents that are hosted on the server should be "given" to the client in koi8-r encoding, and not in windows-1251, as the server does by default. To do this, put the line in .htaccess:

AddType "text/html; charset=koi8-r" .html .htm .shtml

Having received such a .htaccess, the Apache web server will issue a header to the client browser, which will indicate that the document has the koi8-r encoding.

If html documents in different encodings exist on your resource (ISO-8859-1, Windows-1250, Windows-1252, UTF-8), then you may need to disable the forced output of the header with the windows-1251 encoding. To do this, a string is added to .htaccess:

AddDefaultCharset Off

In this case, the corresponding encoding should be written on each html page in the form of a tag

These are examples of the simplest use of Apache configuration capabilities via the .htaccess file.

More options:
DefaultLanguage ru
AddDefaultCharset windows-1251
php_value default_charset "cp1251"