Question

My JavaScript get string value from server:

var name = VALUE_FROM_SERVER;

This name will be shown on a web page, since name contains Scandinavian letter (for example, name could be TÖyoeävä) I need to encode it somehow to display it correctly on the browser.

In JavaScript, what is the most efficient way to encode all those Scandinavian letters?

(I prefer to do it with Javascript.)

(e.g. I would like to create a JS function which takes TÖyoeävä as parameter and returns TÖyoeävä)

var encoder=function(string){
  for(var s=0; s<string.length; s++){
        //Check each letter in the string, if it is Scandinavian, encode it?? 
  }

}

Answer 1

I’d advise you not to encode in the JS. Just make sure your (html) page encoding matches what your server is returning.

Preferably, that would be a UTF-8 encoding (to be able to support other languages down the road). But if it’s just Scandinavian languages you’re interested in, ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) is enough.

There’s no way to tell from a random byte string if it’s one encoding or another (generally speaking anyway). So you have to know in your Javascript what encoding the server is sending.

You also have to set your page’s encoding at some point, and that point has to be before the browser starts interpreting its content.

So all in all, getting encoding A from the server en converting to encoding B on the client side is going to be tricky, and pretty much a waste of time (IMO). You’re not gaining any flexibility that I can see, except allowing your server to change encodings, which doesn’t seem like such a good idea.

UTF-8 all the way will save you headaches.