JSON.stringify() to UTF-8

Question

Javascript uses as far as I know UTF-16 fundamentally as a standard for strings. With JSON.stringify() I can create a JSON string from an object.

Is that JSON string UTF-16 encoded?

Can I convert (hopefully fast) that string to UTF-8 to save bandwidth for huge files (1MB JSON)?

Strings aren't in UTF-8 or UTF-16 : only their binary representation resulting of an encoding is. — Denys Séguret
– Denys Séguret, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 15:40
The assumption that utf-8 is more space efficient that utf-16 is not correct in some cases, code points above \0800 are more efficiently stored in utf-16 — Alex K.
– Alex K., Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 15:49

Lightness Races in Orbit · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-02 15:38:18Z

9

JavaScript engines are allowed to use either UCS-2 or UTF-16.

So, yes, JSON.stringify() will return a string in whatever encoding your implementation uses for strings. If you were to find a way to change that encoding within the context of your script, it would no longer be a valid JavaScript string.

For serialising it over a network, though, I would expect it to automatically be transcoded into the character set of the HTTP request (assuming you're talking about HTTP). So if you send it via HTTP POST with a character set of UTF-8, your browser should transparently handle the transcoding of that data before it is sent.

Otherwise browsers would really struggle with character set handling.

answered Dec 2, 2014 at 15:38

Lightness Races in Orbit

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2 Comments

Bergi Over a year ago

+1 for "does transparently handle". You should only ever need to specifiy an encoding when doing IO, and not tamper with it on your own.

David Callanan Over a year ago

If you happen to be using some API which deals with Uint8Array (raw bytes), then you can decode a UTF-8 array from a string (or in otherwords encode a string into a UTF-8 array) using new TextEncoder("utf-8").encode(JSON.stringify(object))

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