Scripting
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Documentation
Changelog
Privacy

Encoding

The Encoding type defines a set of supported character encodings used by methods like:

  • Data.fromRawString(str, encoding) — converts a text string into binary data using the specified encoding.
  • Data.toRawString(encoding) — converts binary data back into a string using the specified encoding.

These encodings allow interoperability with various text formats and systems, ensuring compatibility across languages and platforms.

Available Encodings

Encoding Description
"utf-8" / "utf8" UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format). The most common encoding for web and modern text processing. Efficient for ASCII-compatible text and supports all Unicode characters.
"utf-16" / "utf16" UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format). Common in Windows and Apple platforms. Each character typically uses 2 bytes.
"utf-32" / "utf32" UTF-32 (32-bit Unicode Transformation Format). Fixed 4-byte representation per character, used for direct Unicode code point manipulation.
"ascii" American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Represents English letters, digits, and basic symbols using one byte (0–127).
"iso2022JP" ISO-2022-JP. A Japanese character encoding used for emails and legacy systems. Supports JIS X 0201/0208 character sets.
"isoLatin1" ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1). Covers Western European languages such as English, French, German, and Spanish.
"japaneseEUC" EUC-JP (Extended Unix Code for Japanese). Another Japanese encoding, used mainly in Unix systems.
"macOSRoman" Apple’s MacRoman encoding, historically used on classic Mac OS before Unicode adoption.
"nextstep" NextStep encoding (NS encoding). A legacy encoding from NeXTSTEP systems. Rarely used today.
"nonLossyASCII" Non-lossy ASCII encoding. Ensures that any Unicode string can be safely represented as ASCII escape sequences and later restored without data loss.
"shiftJIS" Shift-JIS encoding for Japanese text, commonly used on Windows in Japan.
"symbol" Symbol encoding, used for specialized symbol fonts such as the Symbol typeface.
"unicode" A general alias for Unicode encodings (usually UTF-16). Behaves similarly to "utf16".
"utf16BigEndian" UTF-16 with big-endian byte order. The most significant byte (MSB) comes first.
"utf16LittleEndian" UTF-16 with little-endian byte order. The least significant byte (LSB) comes first.
"utf32BigEndian" UTF-32 with big-endian byte order.
"utf32LittleEndian" UTF-32 with little-endian byte order.
"windowsCP1250" Windows code page 1250 for Central and Eastern European languages (e.g., Polish, Czech, Hungarian).
"windowsCP1251" Windows code page 1251 for Cyrillic scripts (e.g., Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian).
"windowsCP1252" Windows code page 1252 for Western European languages (similar to Latin-1 but includes additional symbols).
"windowsCP1253" Windows code page 1253 for Greek language support.
"windowsCP1254" Windows code page 1254 for Turkish language support.
"gbk" GBK (Guojia Biaozhun Kuozhan). A widely used simplified Chinese character encoding, extending GB2312 to include traditional Chinese and Japanese kana. It is backward compatible with GB2312.
"gb18030" GB18030 (National Standard of the People's Republic of China). A superset of GBK and GB2312, and the official mandatory standard in China. Fully compatible with Unicode and capable of representing all Unicode characters.

Example Usage

Converting a String to Data and Back

1import { Data } from 'scripting'
2
3// Convert a UTF-8 string to binary data
4const text = "こんにちは世界"  // "Hello World" in Japanese
5const utf8Data = Data.fromRawString(text, "utf-8")
6
7// Convert the binary data back to a string
8const decoded = utf8Data.toRawString("utf-8")
9
10console.log(decoded) // Output: こんにちは世界

Using a Different Encoding

1// Encode using Shift-JIS (Japanese)
2const sjisData = Data.fromRawString("テスト", "shiftJIS")
3
4// Decode back from Shift-JIS
5const decodedSJIS = sjisData.toRawString("shiftJIS")
6console.log(decodedSJIS) // Output: テスト

Example for Windows Encodings

1// Encode text with Central European characters
2const text = "Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy"
3const data = Data.fromRawString(text, "windowsCP1250")
4const result = data.toRawString("windowsCP1250")
5console.log(result)

Notes

  • When encoding or decoding fails (e.g., using the wrong encoding for the data), the returned string may contain invalid characters (�).
  • For most use cases, "utf-8" is recommended due to its compatibility and efficiency.
  • Legacy encodings such as "shiftJIS", "iso2022JP", and "windowsCP125x" are provided for interoperability with older file formats and systems.
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