chardet
Chardet is a character detection module written in pure JavaScript (TypeScript). Module uses occurrence analysis to determine the most probable encoding.
- Packed size is only 22 KB
- Works in all environments: Node / Browser / Native
- Works on all platforms: Linux / Mac / Windows
- No dependencies
- No native code / bindings
- 100% written in TypeScript
- Extensive code coverage
Installation
npm i chardet
Usage
To return the encoding with the highest confidence:
import chardet from 'chardet';
const encoding = chardet.detect(Buffer.from('hello there!'));
// or
const encoding = await chardet.detectFile('/path/to/file');
// or
const encoding = chardet.detectFileSync('/path/to/file');
To return the full list of possible encodings use analyse method.
import chardet from 'chardet';
chardet.analyse(Buffer.from('hello there!'));
Returned value is an array of objects sorted by confidence value in descending order
[
{ confidence: 90, name: 'UTF-8' },
{ confidence: 20, name: 'windows-1252', lang: 'fr' },
];
In browser, you can use Uint8Array instead of the Buffer:
import chardet from 'chardet';
chardet.analyse(new Uint8Array([0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f]));
Working with large data sets
Sometimes, when data set is huge and you want to optimize performance (with a tradeoff of less accuracy),
you can sample only the first N bytes of the buffer:
chardet
.detectFile('/path/to/file', { sampleSize: 32 })
.then((encoding) => console.log(encoding));
You can also specify where to begin reading from in the buffer:
chardet
.detectFile('/path/to/file', { sampleSize: 32, offset: 128 })
.then((encoding) => console.log(encoding));
Supported Encodings:
- UTF-8
- UTF-16 LE
- UTF-16 BE
- UTF-32 LE
- UTF-32 BE
- ISO-2022-JP
- ISO-2022-KR
- ISO-2022-CN
- Shift_JIS
- Big5
- EUC-JP
- EUC-KR
- GB18030
- ISO-8859-1
- ISO-8859-2
- ISO-8859-5
- ISO-8859-6
- ISO-8859-7
- ISO-8859-8
- ISO-8859-9
- windows-1250
- windows-1251
- windows-1252
- windows-1253
- windows-1254
- windows-1255
- windows-1256
- KOI8-R
Currently only these encodings are supported.
TypeScript?
Yes. Type definitions are included.
References
