A lightweight polyfill for text encoders and decoders covering a small set of commonly used encodings.

Some JavaScript runtimes provide limited or inconsistent encoding support through TextEncoder and TextDecoder.
Examples include environments like Hermes (React Native) or certain Node.js builds with limited ICU support.

This module provides reliable encode/decode support for a small set of encodings that may be missing or unreliable in those environments.

• If a native UTF-8 TextEncoder / TextDecoder is available, it is used.
• All other encodings are implemented by this library.

• utf-8 / utf8
• utf-16le
• ascii
• latin1 / iso-8859-1
• windows-1252

These encodings are commonly encountered in metadata formats and legacy text data.

• Encoding and decoding utilities
• Lightweight
• Typed API

npm install @borewit/text-codec

Decodes binary data into a JavaScript string.

Parameters

• bytes (Uint8Array) — The binary data to decode.
• encoding (SupportedEncoding, optional) — Encoding type. Defaults to "utf-8".

Returns

• string — The decoded text.

Example

import { textDecode } from "@borewit/text-codec";

const bytes = new Uint8Array([0x48, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f]);
const text = textDecode(bytes, "ascii");
console.log(text); // "Hello"

Encodes a JavaScript string into binary form using the specified encoding.

Parameters

• input (string) — The string to encode.
• encoding (SupportedEncoding, optional) — Encoding type. Defaults to "utf-8".

Returns

Uint8Array — The encoded binary data.

Example:

import { textEncode } from "@borewit/text-codec";

const bytes = textEncode("Hello", "utf-16le");
console.log(bytes); // Uint8Array([...])

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Feel free to use, modify, and distribute as needed.