1. Pure JS character encoding conversion 
2. Doesn't need native code compilation. Works on Windows and in sandboxed environments like Cloud9.
3. Used in popular projects like Express.js (body_parser), Grunt, Nodemailer, Yeoman and others.
4. Faster than node-iconv (see below for performance comparison).
5. Intuitive encode/decode API
6. Streaming support for Node v0.10+
7. [Deprecated] Can extend Node.js primitives (buffers, streams) to support all iconv-lite encodings.
8. In-browser usage via Browserify (~180k gzip compressed with Buffer shim included).
9. Typescript type definition file included.
10. React Native is supported (need to explicitly npm install two more modules: buffer and stream).
11. License: MIT.


1. Usage
   1. Basic API

javascript
var iconv = require('iconv-lite');

// Convert from an encoded buffer to js string.
str = iconv.decode(Buffer.from([0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f]), 'win1251');

// Convert from js string to an encoded buffer.
buf = iconv.encode("Sample input string", 'win1251');

// Check if encoding is supported
iconv.encodingExists("us-ascii")

Streaming API (Node v0.10+)

javascript

// Decode stream (from binary stream to js strings)
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    var converterStream = iconv.decodeStream('win1251');
    req.pipe(converterStream);

    converterStream.on('data', function(str) {
        console.log(str); // Do something with decoded strings, chunk-by-chunk.
    });
});

// Convert encoding streaming example
fs.createReadStream('file-in-win1251.txt')
    .pipe(iconv.decodeStream('win1251'))
    .pipe(iconv.encodeStream('ucs2'))
    .pipe(fs.createWriteStream('file-in-ucs2.txt'));

// Sugar: all encode/decode streams have .collect(cb) method to accumulate data.
http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    req.pipe(iconv.decodeStream('win1251')).collect(function(err, body) {
        assert(typeof body == 'string');
        console.log(body); // full request body string
    });
});

[Deprecated] Extend Node.js own encodings

NOTE: This doesn't work on latest Node versions. See details.

javascript
// After this call all Node basic primitives will understand iconv-lite encodings.
iconv.extendNodeEncodings();

// Examples:
buf = new Buffer(str, 'win1251');
buf.write(str, 'gbk');
str = buf.toString('latin1');
assert(Buffer.isEncoding('iso-8859-15'));
Buffer.byteLength(str, 'us-ascii');

http.createServer(function(req, res) {
    req.setEncoding('big5');
    req.collect(function(err, body) {
        console.log(body);
    });
});

fs.createReadStream("file.txt", "shift_jis");

// External modules are also supported (if they use Node primitives, which they probably do).
request = require('request');
request({
    url: "http://github.com/", 
    encoding: "cp932"
});

// To remove extensions
iconv.undoExtendNodeEncodings();

1. Supported encodings
2. All node.js native encodings: utf8, ucs2 / utf16-le, ascii, binary, base64, hex.
3. Additional unicode encodings: utf16, utf16-be, utf-7, utf-7-imap.
4. All widespread singlebyte encodings: Windows 125x family, ISO-8859 family, IBM/DOS codepages, Macintosh family, KOI8 family, all others supported by iconv library. Aliases like 'latin1', 'us-ascii' also supported.
5. All widespread multibyte encodings: CP932, CP936, CP949, CP950, GB2312, GBK, GB18030, Big5, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP.

See all supported encodings on wiki.

Most singlebyte encodings are generated automatically from node-iconv. Thank you Ben Noordhuis and libiconv authors!

Multibyte encodings are generated from Unicode.org mappings and WHATWG Encoding Standard mappings. Thank you, respective authors!

Encoding/decoding speed

Comparison with node-iconv module (1000x256kb, on MacBook Pro, Core i5/2.6 GHz, Node v0.12.0). Note: your results may vary, so please always check on your hardware.

operation             iconv@2.1.4   iconv-lite@0.4.7
----------------------------------------------------------
encode('win1251')     ~96 Mb/s      ~320 Mb/s
decode('win1251')     ~95 Mb/s      ~246 Mb/s

1. BOM handling
2. Decoding: BOM is stripped by default, unless overridden by passing stripBOM: false in options (f.ex. iconv.decode(buf, enc, {stripBOM: false})). A callback might also be given as a stripBOM parameter - it'll be called if BOM character was actually found.
3. If you want to detect UTF-8 BOM when decoding other encodings, use node-autodetect-decoder-stream module.
4. Encoding: No BOM added, unless overridden by addBOM: true option.

UTF-16 Encodings

This library supports UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE and UTF-16 encodings. First two are straightforward, but UTF-16 is trying to be smart about endianness in the following ways:

• Decoding: uses BOM and 'spaces heuristic' to determine input endianness. Default is UTF-16LE, but can be overridden with defaultEncoding: 'utf-16be' option. Strips BOM unless stripBOM: false.
• Encoding: uses UTF-16LE and writes BOM by default. Use addBOM: false to override.

Other notes

When decoding, be sure to supply a Buffer to decode() method, otherwise bad things usually happen. Untranslatable characters are set to � or ?. No transliteration is currently supported. Node versions 0.10.31 and 0.11.13 are buggy, don't use them (see #65, #77).

Testing

bash
$ git clone git@github.com:ashtuchkin/iconv-lite.git
$ cd iconv-lite
$ npm install
$ npm test
    
$ # To view performance:
$ node test/performance.js

$ # To view test coverage:
$ npm run coverage
$ open coverage/lcov-report/index.html