JavaScript Encoding & Decoding Error

Question

I am getting an issue with Javascript Encoding and Decoding. I have a json object which contains a string encoded in UTF-8 like 'R\xc3\xa9union'. To ensure that the Javascript file correctly displays the string, I'm adding an attribute charset to the script tag. The json object is in countries.js. I'm including countries.js as <script src="js/countries.js" charset="UTF-8"></script> and yet it is still being displayed as Réunion instead of Réunion. Any suggestion?

Answer 1

Use escape() combined with decodeURIComponent():

decodeURIComponent(escape('R\xc3\xa9union'));

That should do the trick:

escape('R\xc3\xa9union');           // "R%C3%A9union"
decodeURIComponent("R%C3%A9union"); // "Réunion"

Now, you said you couldn't do this manually for all the places you need strings from the JSON. I really don't know a way to automate this without re-building the JSON with JS, so I'd suggest writing a little "wrapper" function to decode on the fly:

function dc(str){
    return decodeURIComponent(escape(str));
}

You can then decode the required strings with minimal effort:

var myString = dc(myJson["some"]["value"]);

Now, what else could work, but is a little more risky: JSON.stringify() the entire object, decode that using the 2 functions, then JSON.parse() it again.