TextDecoder

{{APIRef("Encoding API")}} {{AvailableInWorkers}} 

The TextDecoder interface represents a decoder for a specific text encoding, such as UTF-8, ISO-8859-2, KOI8-R, GBK, etc. A decoder takes a stream of bytes as input and emits a stream of code points.

Constructor

• {{DOMxRef("TextDecoder.TextDecoder", "TextDecoder()")}} 
  • : Returns a newly constructed TextDecoder that will generate a code point stream with the decoding method specified in parameters.

Instance properties

The TextDecoder interface doesn’t inherit any properties.

• {{DOMxRef("TextDecoder.encoding")}}  {{ReadOnlyInline}} 
  • : A string containing the name of the decoder, which is a string describing the method the TextDecoder will use.
• {{DOMxRef("TextDecoder.fatal")}}  {{ReadOnlyInline}} 
  • : A {{jsxref('Boolean')}}  indicating whether the error mode is fatal.
• {{DOMxRef("TextDecoder.ignoreBOM")}}  {{ReadOnlyInline}} 
  • : A {{jsxref('Boolean')}}  indicating whether the byte order mark is ignored.

Instance methods

The TextDecoder interface doesn’t inherit any methods.

• {{DOMxRef("TextDecoder.decode()")}} 
  • : Returns a string containing the text decoded with the method of the specific TextDecoder object.

Examples

Representing text with typed arrays

This example shows how to decode a Chinese/Japanese character , as represented by five different typed arrays: {{jsxref("Uint8Array")}} , {{jsxref("Int8Array")}} , {{jsxref("Uint16Array")}} , {{jsxref("Int16Array")}} , and {{jsxref("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 {{domxref("TextDecoder/TextDecoder", "TextDecoder()")}}  constructor, we specify the Windows-1251 character encoding, which is appropriate for Cyrillic script.

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

Specifications

{{Specifications}} 

Browser compatibility

{{Compat}} 

See also

• The {{DOMxRef("TextEncoder")}}  interface describing the inverse operation.
• A shim allowing to use this interface in browsers that do not support it.
• Node.js supports global export from v11.0.0