TextDecoder: encoding property

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This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨January 2020⁩.

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The TextDecoder.encoding read-only property returns a string containing the name of the character encoding that this decoder will use.

The encoding is set by the label parameter passed to the constructor, and defaults to utf-8.

Value

A lower-cased ASCII string, which can be one of the following values:

• The recommended encoding for the Web: 'utf-8'.
• The legacy single-byte encodings: 'ibm866', 'iso-8859-2', 'iso-8859-3', 'iso-8859-4', 'iso-8859-5', 'iso-8859-6', 'iso-8859-7', 'iso-8859-8', 'iso-8859-8i', 'iso-8859-10', 'iso-8859-13', 'iso-8859-14', 'iso-8859-15', 'iso-8859-16', 'koi8-r', 'koi8-u', 'macintosh', 'windows-874', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1251', 'windows-1252', 'windows-1253', 'windows-1254', 'windows-1255', 'windows-1256', 'windows-1257', 'windows-1258', or 'x-mac-cyrillic'.
• The legacy multi-byte Chinese (simplified) encodings: 'gbk', 'gb18030'.
• The legacy multi-byte Chinese (traditional) encoding: 'big5'.
• The legacy multi-byte Japanese encodings: 'euc-jp', 'iso-2022-jp', 'shift-jis'.
• The legacy multi-byte Korean encodings: 'euc-kr'.
• The legacy miscellaneous encodings: 'utf-16be', 'utf-16le', 'x-user-defined'.
• A special encoding, 'replacement'. This decodes empty input into empty output and any other arbitrary-length input into a single replacement character. It is used to prevent attacks that mismatch encodings between the client and server. The following encodings also map to the replacement encoding: ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-ext, 'iso-2022-kr', and 'hz-gb-2312'.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• The TextDecoder interface it belongs to.