text-encoding

What is text-encoding?

The text-encoding npm package provides a polyfill for the TextEncoder and TextDecoder APIs, which are used to encode and decode text in various character encodings. This is particularly useful for handling text data in web applications, especially when dealing with different character sets and ensuring proper encoding and decoding of text.

What are text-encoding's main functionalities?

Text Encoding

This feature allows you to encode a string into a Uint8Array using a specified encoding (UTF-8 in this case). The code sample demonstrates how to encode the string 'Hello, world!' into a Uint8Array.

const { TextEncoder } = require('text-encoding');
const encoder = new TextEncoder('utf-8');
const encoded = encoder.encode('Hello, world!');
console.log(encoded);

Text Decoding

This feature allows you to decode a Uint8Array back into a string using a specified encoding (UTF-8 in this case). The code sample demonstrates how to decode a Uint8Array back into the string 'Hello, world!'.

const { TextDecoder } = require('text-encoding');
const decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8');
const encoded = new Uint8Array([72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100, 33]);
const decoded = decoder.decode(encoded);
console.log(decoded);

Other packages similar to text-encoding

buffer

The buffer package provides a way of handling binary data in Node.js. It includes methods for encoding and decoding text, similar to text-encoding, but also offers a broader range of functionalities for working with binary data.

iconv-lite

The iconv-lite package provides pure JavaScript character encoding conversion. It supports a wide range of encodings and is often used for converting text between different character sets. It offers more extensive encoding support compared to text-encoding.

utf-8-validate

The utf-8-validate package is used to validate UTF-8 encoded data. While it does not provide encoding and decoding functionalities, it is useful for ensuring that data is correctly encoded in UTF-8, which can complement the functionalities provided by text-encoding.

README

text-encoding

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 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 and bower as 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.