Deno: how to take care of accents when reading from windows terminal prompt? - unicode

Question

I'm trying to use Deno to read an user input, but I'm having trouble with the encoding.
Here is my simple code from a Deno shell when I enter "áé":
> const a = prompt('Insert your character:');
Insert your character: áé
undefined
> a
"��"
My Windows command prompt has the encoding in CP-1252, that is very similar to ISO-8859-1.
How do I tell Deno the encoding of the string I inputed? Or how do I decode it from cp-1252?

Answer 1

It's possible this behavior will change in future versions of Deno (see New prompt method gets confused when receiving special characters as input [ã] · Issue #8239 · denoland/deno) but for now if you need to use an encoding other than the one used by prompt (which currently appears to always be UTF-8) then you can directly use Deno.stdin which implements Deno.Reader.
e.g. Using readLines you can specify the encoding:
import { readLines } from "https://deno.land/std#0.105.0/io/bufio.ts";
async function prompt(
message = "Prompt",
{ encoding }: { encoding?: string } = {}
) {
await Deno.stdout.write(new TextEncoder().encode(`${message} `));
const { value } = await readLines(Deno.stdin, { encoding }).next();
return <string>value || null;
}
const a = await prompt("Insert your character:", { encoding: "windows-1252" });
console.log(a);