Encoding / decoding UTF8 in javascript

From time to time it has somewhat annoyed me that UTF8 (today's most common Unicode transport encoding, recommended by the IETF) conversion is not readily available in browser javascript. It really is, though, I realized today:

function encode_utf8( s )
{
  return unescape( encodeURIComponent( s ) );
}

function decode_utf8( s )
{
  return decodeURIComponent( escape( s ) );
}

Tested and working like a charm in these browsers:

Win32

• Firefox 1.5.0.6
• Firefox 1.5.0.4
• Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180
• Opera 9.0.8502

MacOS

• Camino 2006061318 (1.0.2)
• Firefox 1.5.0.4
• Safari 2.0.4 (419.3)

Any modern standards compliant browser should handle this code, though, so don't worry that it's a rather sparse test matrix. But feel free to use my test case: encoding and decoding the word "räksmörgås". That's incidentally Swedish for a shrimp sandwich, by the way -- very good subject matter indeed.

And if you hand me your platform/browser combination and the its success/failure status for the tests, I'll try to update the post accordingly.

Categories:

• javascript
• unicode
• utf8
• tips