Node.JS scrape encoding?

Question

I'm fetching this page with with this request library in Node.JS, and parsing the body using cheerio.

Calling $.html() on the parsed response body reveals that the title attribute for the page is:

<title>Le Relais de l'Entrec?te</title>

... when it should be:

<title>Le Relais de l'Entrecôte</title>

I've tried setting the options for the request library to include encoding: 'utf8', but that didn't seem to change anything.

How do I preserve these characters?

Answer 1

You can use iconv (or better iconv-lite) for the conversion itself, but to detect the encoding you should check out the charset and jschardet modules. Here's an example of them both in action:

var charset = require('charset'),
    jschardet = require('jschardet'),
    Iconv = require('iconv').Iconv;

request.get({url: 'http://www.example.com', encoding: 'binary'}, function(err, res, body) {
    var enc = charset(res.headers, body) || jschardet.detect(body).encoding.toLowerCase();

    if(enc !== 'utf8') {
        var iconv = new Iconv(enc, 'UTF-8//TRANSLIT//IGNORE');
        body = iconv.convert(new Buffer(body, 'binary')).toString('utf8');
    }

    console.log(body);
});

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