Uint8Array to string in Javascript

TextEncoder and TextDecoder from the Encoding standard, which is polyfilled by the stringencoding library, converts between strings and ArrayBuffers:

var uint8array = new TextEncoder().encode("¢");
var string = new TextDecoder().decode(uint8array);

Here's what I use:

var str = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, uint8Arr);

This should work:

// http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/amuse/javascript/expert/utf.txt

/* utf.js - UTF-8 <=> UTF-16 convertion
 *
 * Copyright (C) 1999 Masanao Izumo <[email protected]>
 * Version: 1.0
 * LastModified: Dec 25 1999
 * This library is free.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it.
 */

function Utf8ArrayToStr(array) {
    var out, i, len, c;
    var char2, char3;

    out = "";
    len = array.length;
    i = 0;
    while(i < len) {
    c = array[i++];
    switch(c >> 4)
    { 
      case 0: case 1: case 2: case 3: case 4: case 5: case 6: case 7:
        // 0xxxxxxx
        out += String.fromCharCode(c);
        break;
      case 12: case 13:
        // 110x xxxx   10xx xxxx
        char2 = array[i++];
        out += String.fromCharCode(((c & 0x1F) << 6) | (char2 & 0x3F));
        break;
      case 14:
        // 1110 xxxx  10xx xxxx  10xx xxxx
        char2 = array[i++];
        char3 = array[i++];
        out += String.fromCharCode(((c & 0x0F) << 12) |
                       ((char2 & 0x3F) << 6) |
                       ((char3 & 0x3F) << 0));
        break;
    }
    }

    return out;
}

It's somewhat cleaner as the other solutions because it doesn't use any hacks nor depends on Browser JS functions, e.g. works also in other JS environments.

Check out the JSFiddle demo.

Also see the related questions: here and here

Tags:

Javascript