I´m trying to convert the text from an ANSI encoded file to an UTF8 encoded text in node.js.

I´m reading the info from the file using node´s core Fyle System. Is there any way to 'tell' to readFile that the encoding is ANSI?

fs = require('fs');
        fs.readFile('..\\\\LogSSH\\' + fileName + '.log', 'utf8', function (err, data) {
            if (err) {
                console.log(err);
            }

If not, how can I convert that text?

I´m trying to convert the text from an ANSI encoded file to an UTF8 encoded text in node.js.

I´m reading the info from the file using node´s core Fyle System. Is there any way to 'tell' to readFile that the encoding is ANSI?

fs = require('fs');
        fs.readFile('..\\\\LogSSH\\' + fileName + '.log', 'utf8', function (err, data) {
            if (err) {
                console.log(err);
            }

If not, how can I convert that text?

• javascript
• node.js
• utf-8
• fs

Share Improve this question Follow asked Dec 13, 2016 at 15:35 Asier PomposoAsier Pomposo 61944 gold badges1010 silver badges2020 bronze badges

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2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 5

Of course, ANSI is not actually an encoding. But no matter what exact encoding we're talking about I can't see any Microsoft code pages included in the relatively short list documented at Buffers and Character Encodings:

• ascii - for 7-bit ASCII data only. This encoding is fast and will strip the high bit if set.

• utf8 - Multibyte encoded Unicode characters. Many web pages and other document formats use UTF-8.

• utf16le - 2 or 4 bytes, little-endian encoded Unicode characters. Surrogate pairs (U+10000 to U+10FFFF) are supported.

• ucs2 - Alias of 'utf16le'.

• base64 - Base64 encoding. When creating a Buffer from a string, this encoding will also correctly accept "URL and Filename Safe Alphabet" as specified in RFC4648, Section 5.

• latin1 - A way of encoding the Buffer into a one-byte encoded string (as defined by the IANA in RFC1345, page 63, to be the Latin-1 supplement block and C0/C1 control codes).

• binary - Alias for 'latin1'.

• hex - Encode each byte as two hexadecimal characters.

If you work in Western Europe you may be tempted to use latin1 as synonym for Windows-1252 but it'll render incorrect results as soon as you print a € symbol.

So the answer is no, you need to install a third-party package like iconv-lite.

In my case the convertion between types was due to the need to use special latin characters as 'í' or 'ó'. I solve it changing the encoding from 'utf8' to binary in the fs.readFile() function:

 fs.readFile('..\\LogSSH\\' + fileName + '.log', {encoding: "binary"}, function (err, data) {
            if (err) {
                console.log(err);
            }