JavaScript TextDecoder and TextEncoder

1. Overview

What if the binary data is actually a string? For instance, we received a file with textual data.

The build-in TextDecoder object allows to read the value into an actual JavaScript string, given the buffer and the encoding.

We first need to create it:

let decoder = new TextDecoder([label], [options]);

• label – the encoding, utf-8 by default, but big5, windows-1251 and many other are also supported.
• options – optional object:
  • fatal – boolean, if true then throw an exception for invalid (non-decodable) characters, otherwise (default) replace them with character \uFFFD.
  • ignoreBOM – boolean, if true then ignore BOM (an optional byte-order Unicode mark), rarely needed.

…And then decode:

let str = decoder.decode([input], [options]);

• input – BufferSource to decode.
• options – optional object:
  • stream – true for decoding streams, when decoder is called repeatedly with incoming chunks of data. In that case a multi-byte character may occasionally split between chunks. This options tells TextDecoder to memorize “unfinished” characters and decode them when the next chunk comes.

For instance:

let uint8Array = new Uint8Array([72, 101, 108, 108, 111]);

alert( new TextDecoder().decode(uint8Array) ); // Hello

let uint8Array = new Uint8Array([228, 189, 160, 229, 165, 189]);

alert( new TextDecoder().decode(uint8Array) ); // 你好

We can decode a part of the buffer by creating a subarray view for it:

let uint8Array = new Uint8Array([0, 72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 0]);

// the string is in the middle
// create a new view over it, without copying anything
let binaryString = uint8Array.subarray(1, -1);

alert( new TextDecoder().decode(binaryString) ); // Hello

2. TextEncoder

TextEncoder does the reverse thing – converts a string into bytes.

The syntax is:

let encoder = new TextEncoder();

The only encoding it supports is “utf-8”.

It has two methods:

• encode(str) – returns Uint8Array from a string.
• encodeInto(str, destination) – encodes str into destination that must be Uint8Array.

let encoder = new TextEncoder();

let uint8Array = encoder.encode("Hello");
alert(uint8Array); // 72,101,108,108,111