text-decoding

What is text-decoding?

The text-decoding npm package provides an implementation of the Encoding Living Standard API for decoding text. This is particularly useful for environments where the TextDecoder interface is not available, such as in certain Node.js versions or specific browsers. It allows for decoding of text from various encoded formats into a string format that JavaScript can work with.

What are text-decoding's main functionalities?

Decoding text from UTF-8

This feature allows for decoding of text from a UTF-8 encoded Uint8Array to a JavaScript string. It's useful for reading binary data that represents text.

"use strict";\nconst { TextDecoder } = require('text-decoding');\nconst uint8Array = new Uint8Array([72, 101, 108, 108, 111]);\nconst decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8');\nconst text = decoder.decode(uint8Array);\nconsole.log(text); // Outputs: Hello

Decoding text with options

This feature demonstrates decoding with options such as 'ignoreBOM' for ignoring Byte Order Mark and 'fatal' for throwing an error on invalid input. It's useful for more controlled decoding scenarios.

"use strict";\nconst { TextDecoder } = require('text-decoding');\nconst uint8Array = new Uint8Array([226, 130, 172]);\nconst decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8', { ignoreBOM: true, fatal: true });\nconst text = decoder.decode(uint8Array);\nconsole.log(text); // Outputs: €

Other packages similar to text-decoding

iconv-lite

iconv-lite is a popular package for character encoding conversion in Node.js. Unlike text-decoding, which focuses on decoding according to the Encoding Living Standard, iconv-lite supports a wider range of character encodings. It's more versatile for applications that need to work with various encodings beyond what's commonly supported by web standards.

buffer

The buffer package provides Node.js Buffer support in the browser. While not directly comparable to text-decoding, it includes functionality for handling binary data and can be used in conjunction with text encoding and decoding operations. It's more focused on binary data manipulation rather than specifically on text decoding.

README

text-decoding

text-decoding is a fork of Polyfill for the Encoding Living Standard's API (text-encoding) For Node.JS.

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.

yarn add text-decoding

Table Of Contents

• Table Of Contents
• API
• class TextDecoder
• class TextEncoder
• const EncodingIndexes
• getEncoding(label: string): { name: string, labels: Array<string> }
• Encodings
• Copyright

API

The package is available by importing its named classes and functions:

import { TextEncoder, TextDecoder, EncodingIndexes, getEncoding } from 'text-decoding'

class TextDecoder

Decodes a Uint8Array into a string.

Source	Output
import { TextDecoder } from 'text-decoding' const decoded = new TextDecoder('utf-8') .decode(new Uint8Array([ 0x7A, 0xC2, 0xA2, 0xE6, 0xB0, 0xB4, 0xF0, 0x9D, 0x84, 0x9E, 0xF4, 0x8F, 0xBF, 0xBD, ])) console.log(decoded)	z¢水𝄞􏿽

class TextEncoder

Encodes a string into Uint8Array for the given encoding.

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:

import { TextEncoder } from 'text-decoding'

const uint8array = new TextEncoder(
  'windows-1252', { NONSTANDARD_allowLegacyEncoding: true })
  .encode('hello world')

console.log(uint8array)

Uint8Array [ 104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100 ]

const EncodingIndexes

This is a map of indexes used for encoding.

getEncoding(
  label: string,
): { name: string, labels: Array<string> }

Returns the normalised name of the encoding and its associated labels.

Source	Output
import { getEncoding } from 'text-decoding' const encoding = getEncoding('ascii') console.log(encoding)	{ labels: [ 'ansi_x3.4-1968', 'ascii', 'cp1252', 'cp819', 'csisolatin1', 'ibm819', 'iso-8859-1', 'iso-ir-100', 'iso8859-1', 'iso88591', 'iso_8859-1', 'iso_8859-1:1987', 'l1', 'latin1', 'us-ascii', 'windows-1252', 'x-cp1252' ], name: 'windows-1252' }

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.)

Copyright

Original Work By Joshua Bell under dual Unlicense/Apache-2.0 license.

The encoding indexes, algorithms, and many comments in the code derive from the Encoding Standard https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/

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	© Art Deco for Idio 2019			Tech Nation Visa Sucks

Changelog

1.0.0

• [package] Publish v1 of the package.