Determine the Encoding of a HTML Byte Stream

This package implements the HTML Standard's encoding sniffing algorithm in all its glory. The most interesting part of this is how it pre-scans the first 1024 bytes in order to search for certain <meta charset>-related patterns.

1const htmlEncodingSniffer = require("html-encoding-sniffer");
2const fs = require("fs");
3
4const htmlBuffer = fs.readFileSync("./html-page.html");
5const sniffedEncoding = htmlEncodingSniffer(htmlBuffer);

The returned value will be a canonical encoding name (not a label). You might then combine this with the whatwg-encoding package to decode the result:

1const whatwgEncoding = require("whatwg-encoding");
2const htmlString = whatwgEncoding.decode(htmlBuffer, sniffedEncoding);

Options

You can pass two potential options to htmlEncodingSniffer:

1const sniffedEncoding = htmlEncodingSniffer(htmlBuffer, {
2  transportLayerEncodingLabel,
3  defaultEncoding
4});

These represent two possible inputs into the encoding sniffing algorithm:

• transportLayerEncodingLabel is an encoding label that is obtained from the "transport layer" (probably a HTTP Content-Type header), which overrides everything but a BOM.
• defaultEncoding is the ultimate fallback encoding used if no valid encoding is supplied by the transport layer, and no encoding is sniffed from the bytes. It defaults to "windows-1252", as recommended by the algorithm's table of suggested defaults for "All other locales" (including the en locale).

Credits

This package was originally based on the excellent work of @nicolashenry, in jsdom. It has since been pulled out into this separate package.