possible optimization?

[zaggino]

does it have to read the whole buffer?
https://github.com/aadsm/jschardet/blob/master/src/init.js#L72-L85

if it has to read the whole buffer, can it return a string as a result?

i want to check if file that i've opened is an utf-8 file and then return it further, but I don't want to convert whole buffer to string twice

[aadsm]

Yes, you are right. There's no technical need to read the entire Buffer into a string. It's done this way because originally this library was only used on the web (before browsers implemented Blobs) and the conversion from Buffer to String was just a quick and dirty port to node.