Text recoding in JavaScript for fun and profit!
If you are developing against node.js v0.3.0:
git clone git://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-iconv.git
If you are developing against the older but stable node.js v0.2.x:
git clone -b v0.2.x git://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-iconv.git
Both versions of node.js are fully supported. Once v0.3.0 goes stable, support for v0.2.x will be slowly phased out but it will receive bug fixes and minor updates for the foreseeable future.
Ensure that you have libicu installed, including its development package. It is installed by default on ubuntu (libc6-dev must be installed).
To compile and install the module, type:
make install
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.