I'm requesting some text file using IE7's XMLHTTPRequest. XMLHTTPRequest is interpreting the file as utf-8, but it's not in fact that, and it breaks because of that. The server doesn't return a charset directive, and I have no control at all over the server.
How can I make XMLHTTPRequest interpret the response with a different encoding? Or failing that, how can I manually decode the responseBody byte array into a string? Using nothing but javascript.
An alternative method to download the file would also work. The script has local machine privileges so it can do more than a regular browser script.
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Sven Groot
Don't worry... I'm a doctor.
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Sven Groot wrote:I'm requesting some text file using IE7's XMLHTTPRequest. XMLHTTPRequest is interpreting the file as utf-8, but it's not in fact that, and it breaks because of that. The server doesn't return a charset directive, and I have no control at all over the server.
How can I make XMLHTTPRequest interpret the response with a different encoding? Or failing that, how can I manually decode the responseBody byte array into a string? Using nothing but javascript.
An alternative method to download the file would also work. The script has local machine privileges so it can do more than a regular browser script.
The default charset for XHR is UTF-8 with BOM being used to differentiate other encodings when the server returns no charset, so you might try using setRequestHeader() on the XHR to see if sending Accept-Charset might change the server's mind.
Failing that, maybe this might help
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Sven Groot
Don't worry... I'm a doctor.
Nope, that doesn't work either. Thanks anyway.
The only reason it's really a problem is that the file I'm downloading uses an ASCII character >0x7F for an escape sequence. The character they use however (§) starts with 10 in binary and as such can never occur as the first byte of a valid multi-byte utf-8 character. As such the XMLHTTPRequest translates them to 0xFFFF.
At the moment I'm considering working around it by using xmlhttp.responseText.replace(/\uffff/g, '§'). This wouldn't work right for other high-value ASCII characters in the stream but those weren't displayed correctly even if you used the correct character set.
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