charcode

Character encoding conversion for Rust, implementing the WHATWG Encoding Standard — the set of encodings, labels and error behaviours that browsers actually use.

• No dependencies. Nothing outside the standard library. serde is optional and off by default.
• No unsafe. The crate is #![forbid(unsafe_code)].
• no_std. Needs an allocator, nothing else.
• Complete. All 40 encodings in the standard and all 228 of their labels.

[dependencies]
charcode = "0.1"

Converting a buffer

use charcode::{Encoding, WINDOWS_1252};

let (text, encoding, had_errors) = WINDOWS_1252.decode(b"caf\xE9");
assert_eq!(text, "café");
assert_eq!(encoding, WINDOWS_1252);
assert!(!had_errors);

decode implements the standard's decode hook: a byte order mark wins over the encoding you name, and malformed sequences become U+FFFD, with the returned flag telling you whether any did. Encodings are looked up by any label the standard defines, which is what a Content-Type header or a <meta charset> carries:

use charcode::Encoding;

let encoding = Encoding::for_label(b"Shift-JIS").unwrap();
assert_eq!(encoding.name(), "Shift_JIS");
let (text, _) = encoding.decode_without_bom_handling(b"\x93\xFA\x96{");
assert_eq!(text, "日本");

Encoding goes the other way. Characters the target cannot represent become HTML numeric character references, the way form submission does:

use charcode::EUC_KR;

let (bytes, _, had_unmappable) = EUC_KR.encode("한국어 😀");
assert_eq!(&bytes[..], b"\xC7\xD1\xB1\xB9\xBE\xEE 😀");
assert!(had_unmappable);

Both return a Cow, borrowed when the input already is the output, so ASCII through an ASCII-compatible encoding costs only the scan.

Converting a stream

For input that arrives in pieces, a Decoder carries a partial sequence from one buffer to the next. Pass last = true with the final buffer so a truncated sequence is reported rather than dropped:

use charcode::BIG5;

let mut decoder = BIG5.new_decoder();
let mut text = String::new();
decoder.decode_to_string(&[0xA4], &mut text, false);
decoder.decode_to_string(&[0x40], &mut text, true);
assert_eq!(text, "一");

Decoder::decode_to_utf8 and Encoder::encode_from_utf8 are the allocation-free forms, writing into a &mut [u8] you provide. They work with an output buffer as small as four bytes.

Handling errors instead of substituting them

Every conversion comes in two flavours. The default substitutes, as the standard requires for web content. The without_replacement forms stop at the first problem and report it, for callers that need to reject bad input:

use charcode::{SHIFT_JIS, WINDOWS_1252};

assert!(SHIFT_JIS
    .decode_without_bom_handling_and_without_replacement(b"\x81\x20")
    .is_none());

let mut bytes = Vec::new();
let error = WINDOWS_1252
    .new_encoder()
    .encode_from_str_without_replacement("ab一", &mut bytes, true)
    .unwrap_err();
assert_eq!(error.character, '一');
assert_eq!(bytes, b"ab");

Command-line tool

The cli feature builds charcode, an iconv-style converter that adds no dependencies of its own:

cargo install charcode --features cli

$ printf 'caf\xe9' | charcode -f latin1 -t utf-8
café
$ charcode -f shift_jis -t utf-8 notes.txt > notes.utf8.txt
$ charcode --list-labels | grep 'windows-1252$'

Like iconv, it stops at the first byte it cannot convert, -c omits the offending input instead, and either way a lossy run exits non-zero so a script can tell the difference. --substitute asks for the standard's web behaviour instead — U+FFFD for malformed input, a numeric character reference for a character the output encoding cannot represent:

$ printf 'a\xffb' | charcode
charcode: (standard input): malformed byte sequence of 1 byte(s) at offset 1
Use -c to omit it, or --substitute to replace it with U+FFFD.
$ printf 'a\xffb' | charcode --substitute
a<U+FFFD>b

Any label works wherever an encoding is named, a leading byte order mark overrides -f, and iconv's //IGNORE suffix is accepted as a synonym for -c. charcode --help lists the rest.

Supported encodings

UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE and replacement decode only; asking them to encode gives UTF-8, which is what the standard's get an output encoding prescribes.

Features

• std (default) — implements std::error::Error for the error types. Without it the crate is no_std, but still needs alloc.
• serde — an encoding serializes as its name and deserializes from any label.
• cli — builds the charcode command-line tool described above. Adds no dependencies; it needs std.

Relation to encoding_rs

Both implement the same standard and should agree on every conversion. encoding_rs is the one Firefox ships and is faster, using SIMD and a good deal of unsafe to get there. charcode trades that for having no dependencies, no unsafe, and a smaller surface to audit. Use encoding_rs if throughput on large documents is what matters; use charcode if a dependency-free, unsafe-free build is.

Index tables

The tables in src/tables/ are generated from the standard's own indexes.json by tools/generate_tables.py, from the copy of that data checked in under tools/data/. The generated sources are checked in too, so building the crate needs no build script and no network. Re-run the generator only when the upstream indexes change:

python3 tools/generate_tables.py

Minimum supported Rust version

1.88. Raising it is a breaking change.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.