Node.js encoding UTF-8 issue

Ok, your problem is the conversion of latin to utf-8. If you just call your buffer.toString('utf-8'), the latin encoded characters were wrong.

To convert other charset to utf-8, the simple wai is to use iconv and icu-charset-detector. With that, you can switch to utf-8 from all possibles charset (except certains charset).

This is an example of conversion using stream. The result stream is encoded with utf-8 :

var charsetDetector     = require("node-icu-charset-detector"),
    Iconv               = require('iconv').Iconv,
    Stream              = require('stream'),

function convertToUtf8(source, callback) {
    var iconv,
        charsetTestStream = new Stream.PassThrough(),
        newResStream      = new Stream.PassThrough();

    source.pipe(charsetTestStream);
    source.pipe(newResStream);

    charsetDetector.detectCharsetStream(charsetTestStream, function (charset) {
        if (!iconv && charset && !/utf-*8/i.test(charset.toString())) {
            try {
                iconv = new Iconv(charset, 'utf-8');
                console.log('Converting from charset %s to utf-8', charset);
                iconv.on('error', function (err) {
                    callback(err);
                });

                var convertStream = newResStream.pipe(iconv);
                callback(null, convertStream);
            } catch(err) {
                callback(err);
            }
            return;
        }
        callback(null, newResStream);
    });
}