Customize content-type header for text/html/app

[anselmh]

Hey,

I’m trying to set up an application that sets the content-type response header dynamically. The goal is to set a charset in the URL (as parameter) and use that value in the header as charset. It’s an application to test a 3rd party integration in various charset / encoding environments.

I tried to set the content type via
res.set('content-type': 'text/html; charset=mycharset');
which does not work.

I then got the advice to set it in my res.render method but it seems utf-8 is hardcoded and does not accept any overwrites.

Is it simply not possible? If so, may I ask why that is? If there is a solution, can you help me out?

[dougwilson]

Hi! If you are giving Express a string, Express has to encode that sting into bytes somehow. Express does this by using the universal UTF8 encoding format.

If you are using a different charset, then you're going to have to encode your string into bytes using that charset first and hand Express a Buffer object containing those bytes. Then, Express will not touch the charset, because it did not perform the encoding.

Example:

res.type('text/html; charset=foobar');
res.send(new Buffer('05f2bac793a1', 'hex'))

You'll see that we send your bytes as-is and also your charset as-is.