I'm currently having some issues with character encoding in client side JavaScript. My basic program flow is this: client side JavaScript reads a local text file using the nifty FileReader. I then do a bunch of edits on the string, and then I try to offer a way for the user to download the new, altered file. Here's my issue, the file I'm reading from is (according to Notepad++) encoded in ANSI, and the file I want to write also needs to be encoded in ANSI.
When I try reading from the file like this:
reader.readAsText(this.files[0], "ANSI");
...
cachedFile = e.target.result.split("
");
console.log(cachedFile[179544]);
My result is something along the lines of this (the Î character isn't read properly):
name="�le-de-France"
However, when I use ISO-8859-1 as the encoding parameter (a completely random choice), for some reason the result is correct:
name="Île-de-France"
So there's a large chance I have no idea what's happening. So I left it with ISO-8859-1 encoding, did my various edits, and then tried to prepare it for downloading. I can't simply POST this to my server uncompressed and prepare a file for download because this file is, frankly, rather large (~14 mb). It does however compress very nicely since it's plain text. The issue is that any JavaScript compression library I've found (Like jszip which nicely lets you generate a file and stick it in a .zip) seems to maintain JavaScript's internal string encoding, which I believe is UTF-16. The .zip file is also encoded as base64 (which I just decoded on my PHP server). Doing this, of course, gives a final result of something like this:
name="ÃŽle-de-France"
So here's my issue, I have a file encoded in ANSI, I parse it using ISO-8859-1, I edit it in UTF-16, and I need to find a way to get it back into ANSI and onto a person's desktop. Is there a standard way to either convert the JavaScript string to ANSI before compressing it so I can just offer the compressed file to my user to download? Or is there a way to uncompress the string on the server side using PHP, convert to ANSI, and then offer it for download? Just for reference, my current PHP code is simply this:
<?php
$res = $_POST["saveString"];
$maybe = base64_decode($res);
header('Content-Type: application/download');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="genSave.zip"');
header("Content-Length: " . strlen($maybe));
echo $maybe;
?>
