CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsunicodeencoding
neezer
neezer

Reputation: 20560

Node.JS scrape encoding?

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?

Upvotes: 16

Views: 10840

Answers (2)

Ben Dowling
Ben Dowling

Reputation: 17541

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);
});

Upvotes: 33

wulong
wulong

Reputation: 2697

The page appears to be encoded with iso-8859-1. You'll need to tell request to hand you back an un-encoded buffer by passing encoding: null and use something like node-iconv to convert it.

If you're writing a generalized crawler, you'll have to figure out how to detect the encoding of each page you encounter to decode it correctly, otherwise the following should work for your case:

var request = require('request');                                               
var iconv = require('iconv');                                                   

request.get({                                                                   
  url: 'http://www.relaisentrecote.fr',                                         
  encoding: null,                                                               
}, function(err, res, body) {                                                   
  var ic = new iconv.Iconv('iso-8859-1', 'utf-8');                              
  var buf = ic.convert(body);                                                   
  var utf8String = buf.toString('utf-8');  
  // .. do something with utf8String ..                                                                             
});

Upvotes: 23

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