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javascriptencodingutf-8windows-1252

Javascript convert windows-1252 encoding to UTF-8

How do I convert the below string:

var string = "Bouchard+P%E8re+et+Fils"

using javascript into UTF-8, so that %E8 would become %C3%A8?

Reason is this character seems to be tripping up decodeURIComponent

You can test it out by dropping the string into http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ and seeing the console error that says Uncaught URIError: URI malformed

I'm looking specifically for something that can decode an entire html document, that claims to be windows-1252 encoded which is where I assume this %E8 character is coming from, into UTF-8.

Thanks!

Solution

  • First create a map of Windows-1252. You can find references to the encoding using your search engine of choice.

    For the sake of this example, I'm going to include on the character in your sample data.

    Then find all the percentage signs followed by two hexadecimal characters, convert them to numbers, and convert them using the map (to get raw data), then convert them again using encodeURIComponent (to get the encoded data).

    var string = "Bouchard+P%E8re+et+Fils"

var w2512chars = [];
w2512chars[232] = "è"

var percent_encoded = /(%[a-fA-F0-9]{2})/g;

function filter(match, group) {
  var number = parseInt(group.substr(1), 16);
  var character = w2512chars[number];
  return encodeURIComponent(character);
}

string = string.replace(percent_encoded, filter);
alert(string);