Uint8Array to string in Javascript

I have some UTF-8 encoded data living in a range of Uint8Array elements in Javascript. Is there an efficient way to decode these out to a regular javascript string (I believe Javascript uses 16 bit Unicode)? I dont want to add one character at the time as the string concaternation would become to CPU intensive.

Solution 1:

TextEncoder and TextDecoder from the Encoding standard, which is polyfilled by the stringencoding library, converts between strings and ArrayBuffers:

var uint8array = new TextEncoder().encode("¢");
var string = new TextDecoder().decode(uint8array);

Solution 2:

This should work:

// http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/amuse/javascript/expert/utf.txt

/* utf.js - UTF-8 <=> UTF-16 convertion
 *
 * Copyright (C) 1999 Masanao Izumo <[email protected]>
 * Version: 1.0
 * LastModified: Dec 25 1999
 * This library is free.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it.
 */

function Utf8ArrayToStr(array) {
    var out, i, len, c;
    var char2, char3;

    out = "";
    len = array.length;
    i = 0;
    while(i < len) {
    c = array[i++];
    switch(c >> 4)
    { 
      case 0: case 1: case 2: case 3: case 4: case 5: case 6: case 7:
        // 0xxxxxxx
        out += String.fromCharCode(c);
        break;
      case 12: case 13:
        // 110x xxxx   10xx xxxx
        char2 = array[i++];
        out += String.fromCharCode(((c & 0x1F) << 6) | (char2 & 0x3F));
        break;
      case 14:
        // 1110 xxxx  10xx xxxx  10xx xxxx
        char2 = array[i++];
        char3 = array[i++];
        out += String.fromCharCode(((c & 0x0F) << 12) |
                       ((char2 & 0x3F) << 6) |
                       ((char3 & 0x3F) << 0));
        break;
    }
    }

    return out;
}

It's somewhat cleaner as the other solutions because it doesn't use any hacks nor depends on Browser JS functions, e.g. works also in other JS environments.

Check out the JSFiddle demo.

Also see the related questions: here and here

Solution 3:

Here's what I use:

var str = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, uint8Arr);