TextDecoder

The TextDecoder interface represents a decoder for a specific method—that is, a specific character encoding—such as utf-8, iso-8859-2, koi8, cp1261, gbk, etc. A decoder takes a stream of bytes as input and emits a stream of code points. For a more scalable, non-native library, see StringView – a C-like representation of strings based on typed arrays.

Examples

Representing text with typed arrays

This example shows how to decode a Chinese/Japanese character , as represented by five different typed arrays: Uint8Array, Int8Array, Uint16Array, Int16Array, and Int32Array.

let utf8decoder = new TextDecoder(); // default 'utf-8' or 'utf8'

let u8arr = new Uint8Array([240, 160, 174, 183]);
let i8arr = new Int8Array([-16, -96, -82, -73]);
let u16arr = new Uint16Array([41200, 47022]);
let i16arr = new Int16Array([-24336, -18514]);
let i32arr = new Int32Array([-1213292304]);

console.log(utf8decoder.decode(u8arr));
console.log(utf8decoder.decode(i8arr));
console.log(utf8decoder.decode(u16arr));
console.log(utf8decoder.decode(i16arr));
console.log(utf8decoder.decode(i32arr));

Handling non-UTF8 text

In this example, we decode the Russian text "Привет, мир!", which means "Hello, world." In our TextDecoder() constructor, we specify the Windows-1251 character encoding, which is appropriate for Cyrillic script.

let win1251decoder = new TextDecoder('windows-1251');
let bytes = new Uint8Array([207, 240, 232, 226, 229, 242, 44, 32, 236, 232, 240, 33]);
console.log(win1251decoder.decode(bytes)); // Привет, мир!

Constructor

TextDecoder()

Returns a newly constructed TextDecoder that will generate a code point stream with the decoding method specified in parameters.

Properties

The TextDecoder interface doesn't inherit any properties.

TextDecoder.prototype.encodingRead only

Is a DOMString containing the name of the decoder, that is a string describing the method the TextDecoder will use.

TextDecoder.prototype.fatalRead only

Is a Boolean indicating whether the error mode is fatal.

TextDecoder.prototype.ignoreBOMRead only

Is a Boolean indicating whether the byte order marker is ignored.

Methods

The TextDecoder interface doesn't inherit any method.

TextDecoder.prototype.decode()

Returns a DOMString containing the text decoded with the method of the specific TextDecoder object.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• The TextEncoder interface describing the inverse operation.
• StringView – a C-like representation of strings based on typed arrays
• A shim allowing to use this interface in browsers that don't support it.
• Components.utils.importGlobalProperties
• Node.js supports global export from v11.0.0