Convert Distorted Character to ISO-8859-1

Question

I am trying to grab some text from a Portuguese site which is encoded in ISO-8859-1 according to the meta tag. I am using NodeJS and a promise-request package. For example, I'll be back

Algs

I believe that I need to convert it to ISO-8859-1 in NodeJS / Javascript. I tried decodeURIComponent, encodeURIComponent, unescape and escape. None of them worked. Some of them even made things worse for the string. Does anyone know how to solve this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you request data through fetch, you can try to convert the data to arrayBuffer:

let result = [];
fetch('isoEncodedApi/data.json').then(response => {
  response.arrayBuffer().then(arrayBuffer => {
    const textDecoder = new TextDecoder('iso-8859-1');
    const decodedResult = textDecoder.decode(arrayBuffer);
    result = JSON.parse(decodedResult);
  });
});