@zxing/text-encoding

What is @zxing/text-encoding?

The @zxing/text-encoding npm package provides a polyfill for the TextEncoder and TextDecoder APIs, which are part of the Encoding Living Standard. These APIs allow for efficient encoding and decoding of text in various character encodings, such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and more. This package is particularly useful for environments where these APIs are not natively supported, such as older browsers or certain Node.js versions.

What are @zxing/text-encoding's main functionalities?

Text Encoding

This feature allows you to encode a string into a Uint8Array using a specified encoding, such as UTF-8. The code sample demonstrates how to encode the string 'Hello, world!' into a UTF-8 encoded Uint8Array.

"use strict";\nconst { TextEncoder } = require('@zxing/text-encoding');\nconst encoder = new TextEncoder('utf-8');\nconst encoded = encoder.encode('Hello, world!');\nconsole.log(encoded);

Text Decoding

This feature enables decoding of Uint8Array or ArrayBuffer data into a string using a specified encoding, such as UTF-8. The code sample shows how to decode a UTF-8 encoded Uint8Array back into the string 'Hello, world!'.

"use strict";\nconst { TextDecoder } = require('@zxing/text-encoding');\nconst decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8');\nconst decoded = decoder.decode(new Uint8Array([72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100, 33]));\nconsole.log(decoded);

Other packages similar to @zxing/text-encoding

text-encoding

The 'text-encoding' package also provides a polyfill for the TextEncoder and TextDecoder APIs, similar to @zxing/text-encoding. It supports a wide range of encodings and is designed to be fully compatible with the Encoding Living Standard. Compared to @zxing/text-encoding, it might offer broader support for different character encodings but may also have differences in bundle size or performance characteristics.

fast-text-encoding

The 'fast-text-encoding' package is another polyfill for TextEncoder and TextDecoder, focusing on performance and a small bundle size. While it offers similar functionality to @zxing/text-encoding, its main selling point is efficiency, making it a good choice for performance-critical applications. However, it might not support as many encodings as the other two packages.

README

text-encoding

This is a fork of https://github.com/inexorabletash/text-encoding, which has been marked as deprecated in the npm registry.

npm info text-encoding

text-encoding@0.7.0 | (Unlicense OR Apache-2.0) | deps: none | versions: 11
Polyfill for the Encoding Living Standard's API.
https://github.com/inexorabletash/text-encoding

DEPRECATED ⚠️  - no longer maintained

keywords: encoding, decoding, living standard

dist
.tarball: https://registry.npmjs.org/text-encoding/-/text-encoding-0.7.0.tgz
.shasum: f895e836e45990624086601798ea98e8f36ee643
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.unpackedSize: 649.6 kB

maintainers:
- inexorabletash <[e-mail]>

dist-tags:
latest: 0.7.0

published a year ago by inexorabletash <[e-mail]>

This fork is published as @zxing/text-encoding and will be available as long as it is in use by @zxing packages.

---

This is a polyfill for the Encoding Living Standard API for the Web, allowing encoding and decoding of textual data to and from Typed Array buffers for binary data in JavaScript.

By default it adheres to the spec and does not support encoding to legacy encodings, only decoding. It is also implemented to match the specification's algorithms, rather than for performance. The intended use is within Web pages, so it has no dependency on server frameworks or particular module schemes.

Basic examples and tests are included.

Install

There are a few ways you can get and use the @zxing/text-encoding library.

HTML Page Usage

Clone the repo and include the files directly:

  <!-- Required for non-UTF encodings -->
  <script src="encoding-indexes.js"></script>
  <script src="encoding.js"></script>

This is the only use case the developer cares about. If you want those fancy module and/or package manager things that are popular these days you should probably use a different library.

Package Managers

The package is published to npm as @zxing/text-encoding. Use through these is not really supported, since they aren't used by the developer of the library. Using require() in interesting ways probably breaks. Patches welcome, as long as they don't break the basic use of the files via <script>.

API Overview

Basic Usage

  var uint8array = new TextEncoder().encode(string);
  var string = new TextDecoder(encoding).decode(uint8array);

Streaming Decode

  var string = "", decoder = new TextDecoder(encoding), buffer;
  while (buffer = next_chunk()) {
    string += decoder.decode(buffer, {stream:true});
  }
  string += decoder.decode(); // finish the stream

Encodings

All encodings from the Encoding specification are supported:

utf-8 ibm866 iso-8859-2 iso-8859-3 iso-8859-4 iso-8859-5 iso-8859-6 iso-8859-7 iso-8859-8 iso-8859-8-i iso-8859-10 iso-8859-13 iso-8859-14 iso-8859-15 iso-8859-16 koi8-r koi8-u macintosh windows-874 windows-1250 windows-1251 windows-1252 windows-1253 windows-1254 windows-1255 windows-1256 windows-1257 windows-1258 x-mac-cyrillic gb18030 hz-gb-2312 big5 euc-jp iso-2022-jp shift_jis euc-kr replacement utf-16be utf-16le x-user-defined

(Some encodings may be supported under other names, e.g. ascii, iso-8859-1, etc. See Encoding for additional labels for each encoding.)

Encodings other than utf-8, utf-16le and utf-16be require an additional encoding-indexes.js file to be included. It is rather large (596kB uncompressed, 188kB gzipped); portions may be deleted if support for some encodings is not required.

Non-Standard Behavior

As required by the specification, only encoding to utf-8 is supported. If you want to try it out, you can force a non-standard behavior by passing the NONSTANDARD_allowLegacyEncoding option to TextEncoder and a label. For example:

var uint8array = new TextEncoder(
  'windows-1252', { NONSTANDARD_allowLegacyEncoding: true }).encode(text);

But note that the above won't work if you're using the polyfill in a browser that natively supports the TextEncoder API natively, since the polyfill won't be used!

You can force the polyfill to be used by using this before the polyfill:

<script>
window.TextEncoder = window.TextDecoder = null;
</script>

To support the legacy encodings (which may be stateful), the TextEncoder encode() method accepts an optional dictionary and stream option, e.g. encoder.encode(string, {stream: true}); This is not needed for standard encoding since the input is always in complete code points.