[node.js] Nodejs convert string into UTF-8

From my DB im getting the following string:

Johan Öbert

What it should say is:

Johan Öbert

I've tried to convert it into utf-8 like so:

nameString.toString("utf8");

But still same problem.

Any ideas?

When you want to change the encoding you always go from one into another. So you might go from Mac Roman to UTF-8 or from ASCII to UTF-8.

It's as important to know the desired output encoding as the current source encoding. For example if you have Mac Roman and you decode it from UTF-16 to UTF-8 you'll just make it garbled.

If you want to know more about encoding this article goes into a lot of details:

What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text

The npm pacakge encoding which uses node-iconv or iconv-lite should allow you to easily specify which source and output encoding you want:

var resultBuffer = encoding.convert(nameString, 'ASCII', 'UTF-8');

I had the same problem, when i loaded a text file via fs.readFile(), I tried to set the encodeing to UTF8, it keeped the same. my solution now is this:

myString = JSON.parse( JSON.stringify( myString ) )

after this an Ö is realy interpreted as an Ö.

I'd recommend using the Buffer class:

var someEncodedString = Buffer.from('someString', 'utf-8');

This avoids any unnecessary dependencies that other answers require, since Buffer is included with node.js, and is already defined in the global scope.