diff --git a/src/Symfony/Component/DomCrawler/Crawler.php b/src/Symfony/Component/DomCrawler/Crawler.php
index 1ad80e933e..5d201dff1e 100644
--- a/src/Symfony/Component/DomCrawler/Crawler.php
+++ b/src/Symfony/Component/DomCrawler/Crawler.php
@@ -127,8 +127,8 @@ class Crawler implements \Countable, \IteratorAggregate
     /**
      * Adds HTML/XML content.
      *
-     * If the charset is not set via the content type, it is assumed
-     * to be ISO-8859-1, which is the default charset defined by the
+     * If the charset is not set via the content type, it is assumed to be UTF-8,
+     * or ISO-8859-1 as a fallback, which is the default charset defined by the
      * HTTP 1.1 specification.
      *
      * @param string      $content A string to parse as HTML/XML
@@ -161,7 +161,7 @@ class Crawler implements \Countable, \IteratorAggregate
         }
 
         if (null === $charset) {
-            $charset = 'ISO-8859-1';
+            $charset = preg_match('//u', $content) ? 'UTF-8' : 'ISO-8859-1';
         }
 
         if ('x' === $xmlMatches[1]) {