Blob URL with UTF-16LE encoding

Question

I have this string %22%00%41%00%22%00%09%00%22%00%42%00%22%00 which is the UTF-16LE equivalent of "A"\t"B". (The \t is a Tab char.)

I am trying to construct a Blob and then a URL for it, but the output isn't decoded to proper entities.

var blob=new Blob([stringHere],{type:'text/csv;charset=UTF-16LE;'});
var blobUrl=URL.createObjectURL(blob);

Is there anyway to tell the Blob the string encoding so that it looks properly when opened in Excel (in this particular case)?

I need UTF-16LE, otherwise using UTF-8 will result in Excel no parsing the .csv file properly.

Thanks.

Musa · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-09 12:28:27Z

2

It looks like you need a utf-16 le bom in the file, which you can't do with a string in js, so you'll have to use a byte array. See example below

var stringHere = '%ff%fe%22%00%41%00%22%00%09%00%22%00%42%00%22%00';
var byteArray = [];
stringHere.replace(/([0-9a-f]{2})/gi, function(d){
    byteArray.push(parseInt(d, 16));
});
var blob=new Blob([new Uint8Array(byteArray)],{type:'text/csv;charset=UTF-16LE;'});
var blobUrl=URL.createObjectURL(blob);

edited Dec 9, 2014 at 12:28

answered Dec 5, 2014 at 20:04

Musa

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10 Comments

Francisc Over a year ago

Hi Musa, thanks. That doesn't seem to output UTF-16LE though. Like you said, I need that encoding for Excel to interpret CSVs properly. BOM is for non-ASCII chars. It seems to me the type thing only looks at MIME Type and ignores the charset specified.

Musa Over a year ago

@Francisc I tried it and it worked for me, if you put the blob url in the browser it will download the file, just give it a csv extension and open it with excel.

Francisc Over a year ago

And you actually see "A" and "B" in different columns?

Francisc Over a year ago

You're right, it does work. I must have done a mistake when I first tested.

Musa Over a year ago

Maybe, I don't know. But thing to remember, each entry in the Uint8Array represents a byte not a character. A utf-8 character can be 1-4 bytes long. The url encoding encoded each byte which made it easy to convert it to an typed array.

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