TextDecoder: TextDecoder() constructor

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.

Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.

The TextDecoder() constructor returns a newly created TextDecoder object for the encoding specified in parameter.

Syntax

js
new TextDecoder()
new TextDecoder(label)
new TextDecoder(label, options)

Parameters

label Optional

A string, defaulting to "utf-8". This may be any valid label.

options Optional

An object with the following properties:

fatal Optional

A boolean value indicating if the TextDecoder.decode() method must throw a TypeError when decoding invalid data. It defaults to false, which means that the decoder will substitute malformed data with a replacement character.

ignoreBOM Optional

A boolean value indicating whether the byte order mark will be included in the output or skipped over. It defaults to false, which means that the byte order mark will be skipped over when decoding and will not be included in the decoded text.

Exceptions

RangeError

Thrown if the value of label is unknown, or is one of the values leading to a 'replacement' decoding algorithm ("iso-2022-cn" or "iso-2022-cn-ext").

Examples

js
const textDecoder1 = new TextDecoder("iso-8859-2");
const textDecoder2 = new TextDecoder();
const textDecoder3 = new TextDecoder("csiso2022kr", { fatal: true }); // Allows TypeError exception to be thrown.
const textDecoder4 = new TextDecoder("iso-2022-cn"); // Throw a RangeError exception.

Specifications

Specification
Encoding
# ref-for-dom-textdecoder①

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobileserver
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
Deno
Node.js
TextDecoder() constructor

Legend

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

See also