html charset that works with Japanese and English characters?

This is the first time I experienced this problem. For some reason when I use this

   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

my dashes are replaced with â€, but japanese characters work fine. I开发者_如何学运维 remember using another charset and the situation was flipped (Japanese characters were replaced with nonsense characters)

Is there a general charset that fits all? I'm completely new to this idea.

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Try using UTF-8. Note that just changing the charset in the header won't convert the content — you need to make sure that the content is actually UTF-8 as well.