utf8

What is utf8?

The utf8 npm package is a library for encoding and decoding UTF-8 in JavaScript. It's designed to handle Unicode strings and convert them to and from UTF-8 byte arrays. It's useful for environments where native JavaScript functions for handling UTF-8 are not available or are not performing well.

What are utf8's main functionalities?

Encoding to UTF-8

This feature allows you to encode a JavaScript string (which is typically UCS-2 or UTF-16) into a UTF-8 encoded string. This is useful when you need to ensure that your data is in UTF-8 format, for example, when interacting with APIs or databases that expect UTF-8 encoded text.

"utf8.encode('Hello World!');"

Decoding from UTF-8

This feature allows you to decode a UTF-8 encoded string back into a regular JavaScript string. This is useful when you receive UTF-8 encoded data and need to convert it to a format that can be easily manipulated in JavaScript.

"utf8.decode('48656c6c6f20576f726c6421');"

Other packages similar to utf8

iconv-lite

iconv-lite is a popular npm package that offers similar functionality to utf8. It can encode and decode various character encodings, including UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1251. It's more comprehensive than utf8 because it supports a wider range of encodings, but it might be overkill if you only need to work with UTF-8.

text-encoding

text-encoding is another npm package that provides TextEncoder and TextDecoder APIs to convert between UTF-8 and UTF-16. It's a polyfill for the Encoding Living Standard's API and is useful for environments that do not support these APIs natively. It's similar to utf8 but also includes support for UTF-16 and other encodings.

README

Node Utf-8 Encoding/Decoding Functions

This is a port of the work done by Chris Veness over the past ten years in relation to encoding and decoding Utf-8 data in a JavaScript environment. I didn't write the core of this, merely modified it to work with Node's package structure and be published on npm, where people can by and large get used to it and stop being confused about this issue. ;P

Installation

npm install utf8

Usage

var utf8 = require('utf8');
    
var c = utf8.encode("私は")
utf8.decode(c);

Questions, Comments?

@ryanmcgrath