diff --git a/development.ini b/development.ini
--- a/development.ini
+++ b/development.ini
@@ -158,7 +158,7 @@ api_access_controllers_whitelist =
 
 ## default encoding used to convert from and to unicode
 ## can be also a comma separated list of encoding in case of mixed encodings
-default_encoding = utf8
+default_encoding = utf-8
 
 ## Set Mercurial encoding, similar to setting HGENCODING before launching Kallithea
 hgencoding = utf-8