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happypdf / utf8Encode

Function: utf8Encode()

ts
function utf8Encode(input, byteOrderMark?): Uint8Array;

Defined in: src/utils/unicode.ts:90

Encodes a string to UTF-8.

Parameters

ParameterTypeDefault valueDescription
inputstringundefinedThe string to be encoded.
byteOrderMarkbooleantrueWhether or not a byte order marker (BOM) should be added to the start of the encoding. (default true)

Returns

Uint8Array

A Uint8Array containing the UTF-8 encoding of the input string.


JavaScript strings are composed of Unicode code points. Code points are integers in the range 0 to 1,114,111 (0x10FFFF). When serializing a string, it must be encoded as a sequence of words. A word is typically 8, 16, or 32 bytes in size. As such, Unicode defines three encoding forms: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. These encoding forms are described in the Unicode standard [1]. This function implements the UTF-8 encoding form.


In UTF-8, each code point is mapped to a sequence of 1, 2, 3, or 4 bytes. Note that the logic which defines this mapping is slightly convoluted, and not as straightforward as the mapping logic for UTF-16 or UTF-32. The UTF-8 mapping logic is as follows [2]:

• If a code point is in the range U+0000..U+007F, then view it as a 7-bit integer: 0bxxxxxxx. Map the code point to 1 byte with the first high order bit set to 0:

  b1=0b0xxxxxxx

• If a code point is in the range U+0080..U+07FF, then view it as an 11-bit integer: 0byyyyyxxxxxx. Map the code point to 2 bytes with the first 5 bits of the code point stored in the first byte, and the last 6 bits stored in the second byte:

  b1=0b110yyyyy    b2=0b10xxxxxx

• If a code point is in the range U+0800..U+FFFF, then view it as a 16-bit integer, 0bzzzzyyyyyyxxxxxx. Map the code point to 3 bytes with the first 4 bits stored in the first byte, the next 6 bits stored in the second byte, and the last 6 bits in the third byte:

  b1=0b1110zzzz    b2=0b10yyyyyy    b3=0b10xxxxxx

• If a code point is in the range U+10000...U+10FFFF, then view it as a 21-bit integer, 0bvvvzzzzzzyyyyyyxxxxxx. Map the code point to 4 bytes with the first 3 bits stored in the first byte, the next 6 bits stored in the second byte, the next 6 bits stored in the third byte, and the last 6 bits stored in the fourth byte:

  b1=0b11110xxx    b2=0b10zzzzzz    b3=0b10yyyyyy    b4=0b10xxxxxx

It is important to note, when iterating through the code points of a string in JavaScript, that if a character is encoded as a surrogate pair it will increase the string's length by 2 instead of 1 [4]. For example:

> 'a'.length
1
> '💩'.length
2
> '語'.length
1
> 'a💩語'.length
4

The results of the above example are explained by the fact that the characters 'a' and '語' are not represented by surrogate pairs, but '💩' is.

Because of this idiosyncrasy in JavaScript's string implementation and APIs, we must "jump" an extra index after encoding a character as a surrogate pair. In practice, this means we must increment the index of our for loop by 2 if we encode a surrogate pair, and 1 in all other cases.


References:

MIT Licensed. A fork of pdf-lib.