Pure JS character encoding conversion
¶ ↑
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Doesn't need native code compilation. Works on Windows and in sandboxed environments like Cloud9.
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Used in popular projects like Express.js (body_parser), Grunt, Nodemailer, Yeoman and others.
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Faster than node-iconv (see below for performance comparison).
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Intuitive encode/decode API
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Streaming support for Node v0.10+
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[Deprecated] Can extend Node.js primitives (buffers, streams) to support all iconv-lite encodings.
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In-browser usage via Browserify (~180k gzip compressed with Buffer shim included).
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Typescript type definition file included.
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React Native is supported (need to explicitly
npm install
two more modules:buffer
andstream
). -
License: MIT.
Usage¶ ↑
Basic API¶ ↑
var iconv = require('iconv-lite'); // Convert from an encoded buffer to js string. str = iconv.decode(Buffer.from([0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f]), 'win1251'); // Convert from js string to an encoded buffer. buf = iconv.encode("Sample input string", 'win1251'); // Check if encoding is supported iconv.encodingExists("us-ascii")
Streaming API (Node v0.10+)¶ ↑
// Decode stream (from binary stream to js strings) http.createServer(function(req, res) { var converterStream = iconv.decodeStream('win1251'); req.pipe(converterStream); converterStream.on('data', function(str) { console.log(str); // Do something with decoded strings, chunk-by-chunk. }); }); // Convert encoding streaming example fs.createReadStream('file-in-win1251.txt') .pipe(iconv.decodeStream('win1251')) .pipe(iconv.encodeStream('ucs2')) .pipe(fs.createWriteStream('file-in-ucs2.txt')); // Sugar: all encode/decode streams have .collect(cb) method to accumulate data. http.createServer(function(req, res) { req.pipe(iconv.decodeStream('win1251')).collect(function(err, body) { assert(typeof body == 'string'); console.log(body); // full request body string }); });
[Deprecated] Extend Node.js own encodings¶ ↑
NOTE: This doesn't work on latest Node versions. See details.
// After this call all Node basic primitives will understand iconv-lite encodings. iconv.extendNodeEncodings(); // Examples: buf = new Buffer(str, 'win1251'); buf.write(str, 'gbk'); str = buf.toString('latin1'); assert(Buffer.isEncoding('iso-8859-15')); Buffer.byteLength(str, 'us-ascii'); http.createServer(function(req, res) { req.setEncoding('big5'); req.collect(function(err, body) { console.log(body); }); }); fs.createReadStream("file.txt", "shift_jis"); // External modules are also supported (if they use Node primitives, which they probably do). request = require('request'); request({ url: "http://github.com/", encoding: "cp932" }); // To remove extensions iconv.undoExtendNodeEncodings();
Supported encodings¶ ↑
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All node.js native encodings: utf8, ucs2 / utf16-le, ascii, binary, base64, hex.
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Additional unicode encodings: utf16, utf16-be, utf-7, utf-7-imap.
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All widespread singlebyte encodings: Windows 125x family, ISO-8859 family, IBM/DOS codepages, Macintosh family, KOI8 family, all others supported by iconv library. Aliases like 'latin1', 'us-ascii' also supported.
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All widespread multibyte encodings: CP932, CP936, CP949, CP950, GB2312, GBK, GB18030, Big5, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP.
See all supported encodings on wiki.
Most singlebyte encodings are generated automatically from node-iconv. Thank you Ben Noordhuis and libiconv authors!
Multibyte encodings are generated from Unicode.org mappings and WHATWG Encoding Standard mappings. Thank you, respective authors!
Encoding/decoding speed¶ ↑
Comparison with node-iconv module (1000x256kb, on MacBook Pro, Core i5/2.6 GHz, Node v0.12.0). Note: your results may vary, so please always check on your hardware.
operation iconv@2.1.4 iconv-lite@0.4.7 ---------------------------------------------------------- encode('win1251') ~96 Mb/s ~320 Mb/s decode('win1251') ~95 Mb/s ~246 Mb/s
BOM handling¶ ↑
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Decoding: BOM is stripped by default, unless overridden by passing
stripBOM: false
in options (f.ex.iconv.decode(buf, enc, {stripBOM: false})
). A callback might also be given as astripBOM
parameter - it'll be called if BOM character was actually found. -
If you want to detect UTF-8 BOM when decoding other encodings, use node-autodetect-decoder-stream module.
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Encoding: No BOM added, unless overridden by
addBOM: true
option.
UTF-16 Encodings¶ ↑
This library supports UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE and UTF-16 encodings. First two are straightforward, but UTF-16 is trying to be smart about endianness in the following ways: * Decoding: uses BOM and 'spaces heuristic' to determine input endianness. Default is UTF-16LE, but can be overridden with defaultEncoding: 'utf-16be'
option. Strips BOM unless stripBOM: false
. * Encoding: uses UTF-16LE and writes BOM by default. Use addBOM: false
to override.
Other notes¶ ↑
When decoding, be sure to supply a Buffer to decode() method, otherwise {bad things usually happen}[https://github.com/ashtuchkin/iconv-lite/wiki/Use-Buffers-when-decoding].
Untranslatable characters are set to � or ?. No transliteration is currently supported.
Node versions 0.10.31 and 0.11.13 are buggy, don't use them (see #65, #77).
Testing¶ ↑
$ git clone git@github.com:ashtuchkin/iconv-lite.git $ cd iconv-lite $ npm install $ npm test $ # To view performance: $ node test/performance.js $ # To view test coverage: $ npm run coverage $ open coverage/lcov-report/index.html