Can't find encodings for node.js

Question

Can't find encodings for node.js

I just need to read a file which is encoded with ISO-8859-1 (also called latin1, apparently), something like this:

 var file_contents = fs.readFileSync("test_data.html", "latin1");

Problem is, node complains about "latin1" or "ISO-8859-1" not being a valid encoding ("Error: Unknown encoding").

I can't find the list of encodings that readFileSync accepts (where is such list?), neither I know if I'm doing something wrong (what's the right way of reading a latin1-encoded file in node?)...

Thanks in advance.

node.js

Answer 1

The list of encodings that node supports natively is rather short and does not include ISO-8859-1.

Use iconv-lite to recode files:

var iconvlite = require('iconv-lite');
var fs = require('fs');

function readFileSync_encoding(filename, encoding) {
    var content = fs.readFileSync(filename);
    return iconvlite.decode(content, encoding);
}

Alternatively, use iconv:

var Iconv = require('iconv').Iconv;
var fs = require('fs');

function readFileSync_encoding(filename, encoding) {
    var content = fs.readFileSync(filename);
    var iconv = new Iconv(encoding, 'UTF-8');
    var buffer = iconv.convert(content);
    return buffer.toString('utf8');
}

Answer 2

If the above solution does not work for you it is may be possible to obtain the same result with the following pure nodejs code. The above did not work for me and resulted in a compilation exception when running 'npm install iconv' on OSX:

npm install iconv

npm WARN package.json portalServer@0.1.0 No README.md file found!
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/iconv
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/iconv
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/iconv/-/iconv-2.0.4.tgz
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/iconv/-/iconv-2.0.4.tgz

> iconv@2.0.4 install /Users/markboyd/git/portal/app/node_modules/iconv
> node-gyp rebuild

gyp http GET http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.1/node-v0.10.1.tar.gz
gyp http 200 http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.1/node-v0.10.1.tar.gz
xcode-select: Error: No Xcode is selected. Use xcode-select -switch <path-to-xcode>, or see the xcode-select manpage (man xcode-select) for further information.

fs.readFileSync() returns a Buffer if no encoding is specified. And Buffer has a toString() method that will convert to UTF8 if no encoding is specified giving you the file's contents. See the nodejs documentation. This worked for me.