TextDecoder: encoding property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since January 2020.

See full compatibility

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The TextDecoder.encoding read-only property returns a string containing the name of the character encoding that this decoder will use.

The encoding is set by the label parameter passed to the constructor, and defaults to utf-8.

Value

A lower-cased ASCII string, which can be one of the following values:

The recommended encoding for the Web: 'utf-8'.
The legacy single-byte encodings: 'ibm866', 'iso-8859-2', 'iso-8859-3', 'iso-8859-4', 'iso-8859-5', 'iso-8859-6', 'iso-8859-7', 'iso-8859-8', 'iso-8859-8i', 'iso-8859-10', 'iso-8859-13', 'iso-8859-14', 'iso-8859-15', 'iso-8859-16', 'koi8-r', 'koi8-u', 'macintosh', 'windows-874', 'windows-1250', 'windows-1251', 'windows-1252', 'windows-1253', 'windows-1254', 'windows-1255', 'windows-1256', 'windows-1257', 'windows-1258', or 'x-mac-cyrillic'.
The legacy multi-byte Chinese (simplified) encodings: 'gbk', 'gb18030'.
The legacy multi-byte Chinese (traditional) encoding: 'big5'.
The legacy multi-byte Japanese encodings: 'euc-jp', 'iso-2022-jp', 'shift-jis'.
The legacy multi-byte Korean encodings: 'euc-kr'.
The legacy miscellaneous encodings: 'utf-16be', 'utf-16le', 'x-user-defined'.
A special encoding, 'replacement'. This decodes empty input into empty output and any other arbitrary-length input into a single replacement character. It is used to prevent attacks that mismatch encodings between the client and server. The following encodings also map to the replacement encoding: ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-CN-ext, 'iso-2022-kr', and 'hz-gb-2312'.

Specifications

Specification
Encoding # ref-for-dom-textdecoder-encoding①

Browser compatibility

	desktop					mobile							server
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Opera	Safari	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on iOS	Samsung Internet	WebView Android	WebView on iOS	Bun	Deno	Node.js
`encoding`	Chrome – Full support Chrome 38 (Release date: 2014-10-07) footnote Full support	Edge – Full support Edge 79 (Release date: 2020-01-15) footnote Full support	Firefox – Partial support Firefox 18 – 18 (Release date: 2013-01-08) footnote Partial support footnote Implemented a slightly different version of the spec. Firefox – Full support Firefox 19 (Release date: 2013-02-19) footnote Full support	Opera – Full support Opera 25 (Release date: 2014-10-15) footnote Full support	Safari – Full support Safari 10.1 (Release date: 2017-03-27) footnote Full support	Chrome Android – Full support Chrome Android 38 (Release date: 2014-10-08) footnote Full support	Firefox for Android – Partial support Firefox for Android 18 – 18 (Release date: 2013-01-08) footnote Partial support footnote Implemented a slightly different version of the spec. Firefox for Android – Full support Firefox for Android 19 (Release date: 2013-02-19) footnote Full support	Opera Android – Full support Opera Android 25 (Release date: 2014-10-16) footnote Full support	Safari on iOS – Full support Safari on iOS 10.3 (Release date: 2017-03-27) footnote Full support	Samsung Internet – Full support Samsung Internet 3 (Release date: 2015-04-10) footnote Full support	WebView Android – Full support WebView Android 38 (Release date: 2014-10-08) footnote Full support	WebView on iOS – Full support WebView on iOS 10.3 (Release date: 2017-03-27) footnote Full support	Bun – Full support Bun 1 (Release date: 2023-09-08) footnote Full support	Deno – Full support Deno 1 (Release date: 2020-05-13) footnote Full support	Node.js – Full support Node.js 8.3 (Release date: 2017-08-09) footnote Full support

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Full support: Full support
Partial support: Partial support
: Has more compatibility info.

TextDecoder: encoding property

Value

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Legend

See also