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javascriptunicodeutf-8spidermonkey

read() in Spidermonkey with unicode

In the Spidermonkey shell, reading in a file with the read() function ignores the encoding of the file. Is there any way to read in a UTF-8 or other multi-byte encoded file and preserve the multi-byte characters? Spidermonkey is such a little devil.

Solution

  • So I talked to the JS guys at Mozilla. Turns out this wasn't entirely possible, so they added a command line flag to enable UTF-8 support for read() and snarf().

    /usr/bin/js -e "print(read('filexyz.txt'))" -U

    In order to get a copy of Spidermonkey with this addition, you'll have to use the Tracemonkey repository. You can get that with Mercurial:

    hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/