html-encoding-sniffer

Determine the Encoding of a HTML Byte Stream

This package implements the HTML Standard's encoding sniffing algorithm in all its glory. The most interesting part of this is how it pre-scans the first 1024 bytes in order to search for certain <meta charset>-related patterns.

const htmlEncodingSniffer = require("html-encoding-sniffer");
const fs = require("fs");

const htmlBytes = fs.readFileSync("./html-page.html");
const sniffedEncoding = htmlEncodingSniffer(htmlBytes);

The passed bytes are given as a Uint8Array; the Node.js Buffer subclass of Uint8Array will also work, as shown above.

The returned value will be a canonical encoding name (not a label). You might then combine this with the whatwg-encoding package to decode the result:

const whatwgEncoding = require("whatwg-encoding");
const htmlString = whatwgEncoding.decode(htmlBytes, sniffedEncoding);

Options

You can pass two potential options to htmlEncodingSniffer:

const sniffedEncoding = htmlEncodingSniffer(htmlBytes, {
  transportLayerEncodingLabel,
  defaultEncoding
});

These represent two possible inputs into the encoding sniffing algorithm:

• transportLayerEncodingLabel is an encoding label that is obtained from the "transport layer" (probably a HTTP Content-Type header), which overrides everything but a BOM.
• defaultEncoding is the ultimate fallback encoding used if no valid encoding is supplied by the transport layer, and no encoding is sniffed from the bytes. It defaults to "windows-1252", as recommended by the algorithm's table of suggested defaults for "All other locales" (including the en locale).

Credits

This package was originally based on the excellent work of @nicolashenry, in jsdom. It has since been pulled out into this separate package.

Similar packages

Other packages similar to html-encoding-sniffer

iconv-lite

iconv-lite is a package that provides encoding and decoding of text in various character sets. Unlike html-encoding-sniffer, which is specifically designed for sniffing HTML document encodings, iconv-lite supports a broader range of encodings and can be used for general text conversion purposes.

jschardet

jschardet is a character encoding detector, similar to the functionality provided by html-encoding-sniffer. However, jschardet is based on the universalchardet library and can be used to detect the encoding of any text, not just HTML documents. It offers a more general approach to encoding detection.