Text recoding in JavaScript for fun and profit!
Installing with npm
npm install iconv
Note that the npm-ified version of node-iconv only works with node.js >= v0.3.0.
If you are developing against node.js v0.3.0 or later:
git clone git://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-iconv.git
If you are developing against node.js v0.2.x:
git clone -b v0.2.x git://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-iconv.git
v0.2.x support is slowly being phased out but it will receive bug fixes for the foreseeable future.
To compile and install the module, type:
make install NODE_PATH=/path/to/nodejs
NODE_PATH will default to /usr/local if omitted.
Note that you do not need to have a copy of libiconv installed to use this module.
Encode from one character encoding to another:
// convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1
var Buffer = require('buffer').Buffer;
var Iconv = require('iconv').Iconv;
var assert = require('assert');
var iconv = new Iconv('UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');
var buffer = iconv.convert('Hello, world!');
var buffer2 = iconv.convert(new Buffer('Hello, world!'));
assert.equals(buffer.inspect(), buffer2.inspect());
// do something useful with the buffers
Look at test.js for more examples and node-iconv's behaviour under error conditions.
Things to keep in mind when you work with node-iconv.
Say you are reading data in chunks from a HTTP stream. The logical input is a single document (the full POST request data) but the physical input will be spread over several buffers (the request chunks).
You must accumulate the small buffers into a single large buffer before performing the conversion. If you don't, you will get unexpected results with multi-byte and stateful character sets like UTF-8 and ISO-2022-JP.
node-buffertools lets you concatenate buffers painlessly. See the description of buffertools.concat() for details.
EINVAL is raised when the input ends in a partial character sequence. This is a feature, not a bug.