How to unescape UTF-8 characters in Node (\u00f6)?

Question

I have a properties file which is encoded using ISO Latin but with special characters as UTF-8 escape sequences, for example the following string:

Einstellun         


        

Answer 1

You either have to parse it as a string-literal, so the unicode-codes are parsed by the engine, therefore you have to wrap it in quotes before running it through JSON.parse().

JSON.parse('"' + str + '"');
//if you use " in your string, you would have to escape it
JSON.parse('"' + str.split('"').join('\\"') + '"');

or you search for the unicode-codes and replace them on your own

str.replace(/\\u([0-9a-fA-F]{4})/g, (m,cc)=>String.fromCharCode("0x"+cc));