nodejs encoding using request

Maybe your trouble is in 'Accept-Encoding' header. Let's say you have Headers like 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate'

If it's so, you have 2 ways to fixing this:

  1. Remove this Header
  2. Use the following code to unzip the data:

    const req = request(options, res => {
        let buffers = []
        let bufferLength = 0
        let strings = []
    
        const getData = chunk => {
            if (!Buffer.isBuffer(chunk)) {
                strings.push(chunk)
            } else if (chunk.length) {
                bufferLength += chunk.length
                buffers.push(chunk)
            }
        }
    
        const endData = () => {
            let response = {code: 200, body: ''}
            if (bufferLength) {
                response.body = Buffer.concat(buffers, bufferLength)
                if (options.encoding !== null) {
                    response.body = response.body.toString(options.encoding)
                }
                buffers = []
                bufferLength = 0
            } else if (strings.length) {
                if (options.encoding === 'utf8' && strings[0].length > 0 && strings[0][0] === '\uFEFF') {
                    strings[0] = strings[0].substring(1)
                }
                response.body = strings.join('')
            }
            console.log('response', response)
        };
    
        switch (res.headers['content-encoding']) {
            // or, just use zlib.createUnzip() to handle both cases
            case 'gzip':
                res.pipe(zlib.createGunzip())
                    .on('data', getData)
                    .on('end', endData)
                break;
            case 'deflate':
                res.pipe(zlib.createInflate())
                    .on('data', getData)
                    .on('end', endData)
                break;
            default:
                res.pipe(zlib.createInflate())
                    .on('data', getData)
                    .on('end', endData)
                break;
        }
    });
    

You can use iconv (lite) to convert this. You also need to tell request not to actively set the encoding to the default of UTF-8 by setting the encoding property to null. Therefore you should do:

var iconv = require('iconv-lite');
request.get({
    uri:'http://www.bold.dk/tv/',
    encoding: null
  },
  function(err, resp, body){    
    var bodyWithCorrectEncoding = iconv.decode(body, 'iso-8859-1');
    console.log(bodyWithCorrectEncoding);
  }
);