pillarjs/iconv-lite

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3175 stars · 296 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

iconv-lite is a pure JavaScript library for converting text between character encodings (UTF-8, Windows-125x, ISO-8859, Shift_JIS, GBK, and many more) without native code compilation. It provides simple encode/decode APIs plus streaming support, and works in Node.js, browsers, and sandboxed environments like React Native.

Use cases

• decode a win1251-encoded buffer to a JavaScript string
• convert a legacy-encoded text file to UTF-8
• read HTTP request bodies in non-UTF-8 charsets
• transcode files between encodings via streams
• check whether a character encoding is supported
• handle Shift_JIS or Big5 text in a Node.js app

When to choose

• you need charset conversion in pure JavaScript with no native dependencies
• you're on Windows or a sandboxed environment where compiling node-iconv is impractical
• you need streaming encode/decode of encoded data
• you're building on Express/body-parser, Nodemailer, or similar ecosystems that rely on it

When to avoid

• you only need UTF-8, which Node.js handles natively
• you need maximum performance and can compile native code (node-iconv with ICU support)
• you need exotic encodings not covered by iconv-lite's supported list

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization parser developer-tools developer-tools web-development files cross-platform browser character-encoding iconv charset-conversion text-decoding streams pure-javascript localization nodejs web-server

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