utf8

[arty-name]

The package is published 7 years ago but still has a million weekly downloads and 1k dependents. It doesn’t specify Node version.

Can be replaced by native TextEncoder.encode and TextDecoder.decode (both since Node 8.3) used with String.fromCharCode.apply().

[43081j]

good catch

although I cant seem to find where the downloads are coming from, so it may be that a lot are in private repos

the largest npm consumer seems to be this (at only ~200k/week):

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-fs

[arty-name]

Oh, React Native is a special beast. Apparently it uses a JS engine called Hermes by default, and while Hermes has added TextEncoder just in this year, support for TextDecoder is not high priority. Looks like this package might stick to utf8 for a while.