node-icu-charset-detector

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node-icu-charset-detector

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A simple binding of ICU character set detection for Node.js

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# ICU Character Set Detection for Node.js

>Character set detection is the process of determining the character set, or encoding, of character data in an unknown format.

A simple binding of ICU character set detection (http://userguide.icu-project.org/conversion/detection) for Node.js.

## Installation

At first, install `libicu` into your system (See [this instruction](#installing-icu) for details).

After that, install `node-icu-charset-detector` from npm.

npm install node-icu-charset-detector

### Installing ICU

#### Linux

* Debian (Ubuntu)

apt-get install libicu-dev

* Gentoo

emerge icu

* Fedora/CentOS

yum install libicu-devel

#### OSX

* MacPorts

port install icu +devel

* Homebrew

```shell
brew install icu4c
brew link icu4c --force
```

If experiencing issues with 'homebrew' installing version 50.1 of icu4c, try the following:

```shell
brew search icu4c
brew tap homebrew/versions
brew versions icu4c
cd $(brew --prefix) && git pull --rebase
git checkout c25fd2f $(brew --prefix)/Library/Formula/icu4c.rb
brew install icu4c
```

* From source

```shell
curl -O http://download.icu-project.org/files/icu4c/52.1/icu4c-52_1-src.tgz
tar xzvf icu4c-4_4_2-src.tgz
cd icu/source
chmod +x runConfigureICU configure install-sh
./runConfigureICU MacOSX
make
sudo make install
xcode-select --install
```

## Usage

### Simple usage

`node-icu-charset-detector` provides a function `detectCharset(buffer)`, where `buffer` is an instance of `Buffer` whose charset should be detected.

```javascript
var charsetDetector = require("node-icu-charset-detector");

var buffer = fs.readFileSync("/path/to/the/file");
var charset = charsetDetector.detectCharset(buffer);

console.log("charset name: " + charset.toString());
console.log("language: " + charset.language);
console.log("detection confidence: " + charset.confidence);
```

`detectCharset(buffer)` returns the detected charset name for `buffer`, and the returned charset name has two extra properties `language` and `confidence`:

- `charset.language`
  - language name for the detected character set.
- `charset.confidence`
  - confidence of the charset detection for `charset`.

### Leveraging node-iconv

Since ICU itself does not have a feature to convert character sets, you may need to use `node-iconv` (https://github.com/bnoordhuis/node-iconv), which has a powerful character sets converting feature.

Here is a simple example to leverage `node-iconv` to convert character sets not supported by Node itself.

```javascript
function bufferToString(buffer) {
  var charsetDetector = require("node-icu-charset-detector");
  var charset = charsetDetector.detectCharset(buffer).toString();

try {
    return buffer.toString(charset);
  } catch (x) {
    var Iconv = require("iconv").Iconv;
    var charsetConverter = new Iconv(charset, "utf8");
    return charsetConverter.convert(buffer).toString();
  }
}

var buffer = fs.readFileSync("/path/to/the/file");
var bufferString = bufferToString(buffer);
```

node-icu-charset-detector

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