Get/set file encoding with javascript's FileReader

Question

I am struggling with the following problem. Using javascript I would like to change the character set of a file content and display this content to the user.

I have an input:file form. On change I am reading the content

$('#form input:file').change(function(event){                   
   file = this.files[0];
   reader = new FileReader();
   reader.onload = function(event) {
      result = event.target.result.replace(/\n/g,'<br />');
      $('#filecontents').html(result);
   });
   reader.readAsText(file);
})

The file is in Windows-1251. I would like to convert the content of the file to another encoding and after that present it to the user.

Is this possible to achieve with javascript?

Regards

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:46:28Z

73

If your HTML page is in UTF-8 and your file is in ISO-8859-1.

This is working:

 reader.readAsText(file, 'ISO-8859-1');

I don't have any Windows-1251 file so I was not able to test it but it looks like that the 'CP1251' is supported (by Google Chrome at least), so:

 reader.readAsText(file, 'CP1251');

If none of this is working. Then you should change the formatting manually. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any JavaScript library that does the trick.

From the unicode mapping here and from Delan Azabani answer, you should manage to build a function that convert char by char your string in CP1251 to UTF-8.

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:46

CommunityBot

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answered Sep 17, 2012 at 16:50

Florian Parain

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3 Comments

Luis A. Florit Over a year ago

Regarding your last sentence, isn't there a "standard" function to convert a ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8?

starmandeluxe Over a year ago

I tried this with a Shift-JIS file as follows: reader.readAsText(f, "Shift-JIS"); which converted to UTF-8 just fine. But now the problem is how to detect that the incoming file is encoded in Shift-JIS...because if I try to send a UTF-8 encoded file into that function it doesn't seem to convert properly.

Chris Barr Over a year ago

This helped me a lot as I was having character encoding issues, but it turned out to be due to me using .readAsDataURL and then Base64 decoding instead of just using .readAsText and I'm done.

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