What is web-encoding?
The web-encoding package provides a polyfill for the TextEncoder and TextDecoder interfaces, which are part of the Encoding Living Standard. These interfaces allow for high-performance encoding and decoding of text in various character encodings, primarily UTF-8.
What are web-encoding's main functionalities?
Text Encoding
This feature allows you to encode a JavaScript string into a Uint8Array of bytes using UTF-8 encoding. It is useful for preparing text data for network transmission or storage.
const { TextEncoder } = require('web-encoding');
const encoder = new TextEncoder();
const encoded = encoder.encode('Hello, world!');
console.log(encoded);
Text Decoding
This feature enables decoding of a Uint8Array of bytes into a JavaScript string using UTF-8 or other supported character encodings. It is essential for reading text data received from a network or read from binary storage.
const { TextDecoder } = require('web-encoding');
const decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8');
const decoded = decoder.decode(new Uint8Array([72, 101, 108, 108, 111]));
console.log(decoded);
Other packages similar to web-encoding
text-encoding
The text-encoding package also provides TextEncoder and TextDecoder polyfills. It supports a wider range of encodings than web-encoding, making it suitable for applications that need to handle various character sets beyond UTF-8.
fast-text-encoding
Similar to web-encoding, fast-text-encoding offers TextEncoder and TextDecoder implementations. It focuses on performance optimizations for UTF-8 encoding and decoding, making it a good choice for performance-critical applications that primarily deal with UTF-8 data.