iconv-lite: Pure JS character encoding conversion

- No need for native code compilation. Quick to install, works on Windows and in sandboxed environments like Cloud9.
- Used in popular projects like Express.js (body_parser), Grunt, Nodemailer, Yeoman and others.
- Faster than node-iconv (see below for performance comparison).
- Intuitive encode/decode API, including Streaming support.
- In-browser usage via browserify or webpack (~180kb gzip compressed with Buffer shim included).
- Typescript type definition file included.
- React Native is supported (need to install `stream` module to enable Streaming API).
- License: MIT.

# Usage

## Basic API

var iconv = require('iconv-lite');
// Convert from an encoded buffer to a js string.
str = iconv.decode(Buffer.from([0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f]), 'win1251');
// Convert from a js string to an encoded buffer.
buf = iconv.encode("Sample input string", 'win1251');
// Check if encoding is supported
iconv.encodingExists("us-ascii")

## Streaming API

// Decode stream (from binary data 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
});
});

# Supported encodings

- All node.js native encodings: utf8, ucs2 / utf16-le, ascii, binary, base64, hex.
- Additional unicode encodings: utf16, utf16-be, utf-7, utf-7-imap, utf32, utf32-le, and utf32-be.
- 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.
- 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

# BOM handling

- 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.
- If you want to detect UTF-8 BOM when decoding other encodings, use node-autodetect-decoder-stream module.
- 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.

# UTF-32 Encodings

This library supports UTF-32LE, UTF-32BE and UTF-32 encodings. Like the UTF-16 encoding above, UTF-32 defaults to UTF-32LE, but uses BOM and 'spaces heuristics' to determine input endianness.

- The default of UTF-32LE can be overridden with the ‘defaultEncoding: 'utf-32be’`option. Strips BOM unless`stripBOM: false`.`
- `Encoding: uses UTF-32LE and writes BOM by default. Use`addBOM: false`to override. (`defaultEncoding: 'utf-32be'` can also be used here to change encoding.)

# 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

$ 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