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I'm using node-webkit to build an app that alerts me every time there is an alarm in my country (we are currently in a war). There is a website that supplies a JSON file that contains info about current alarms.
When I try to access that page and check whether there are alarms, the result is a lot of question marks. I can't use that, and when I try to JSON.parse the data it says that it cannot parse question marks. What do I do? 

url: "http://www.oref.org.il/WarningMessages/alerts.json",
checkAlert: function(callback) {
    request({ 
        uri: this.url,
        json: true,
        encoding: 'utf-8'

        }, function(err, res, json) { 
            if (err)
                return console.log(err);

            json = JSON.parse(json);
            var data = json.data;

            console.log('just checked. json.data: ' + data);

            if (data.length != 0) // if array is not empty
                callback(true);
            else
                callback(false);
    });
}

Here's how the file looks like:

{ 
"id" : "1405751634717",
"title" : "something in hebrew ",
"data" : []
}

Thanks a lot!

batman191
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2 Answers2

1

That API returns a JSON response encoded in UTF-16-LE, so you'll have to tell request to use that encoding instead.

However, since you're trying to query Pikud Haoref's alerts API, check out pikud-haoref-api on npm to do the heavy lifting for you:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikud-haoref-api

(Disclaimer: I created this package)

Elad Nava
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0

Have a look here: jQuery doesn't display Hebrew

And be totally sure first that your JSON files are actually enconded in UTF-8

You might want to check how your server is serving those JSON and which codification they have.

Check also this link: http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2012/03/14/dealing-with-utf-in-node-js/

Quick overview:

“V8 currently only accepts characters in the BMP as input, using UCS-2 as internal representation (the same representation as JavaScript strings).” Basically, this means that JavaScript uses the UCS-2 character encoding internally, which is strictly a 16-bit format, which in turn means that it can only support the first 65,536 code-points of Unicode characters. Any characters that fall outside that range are apparently truncated in the conversion from UTF-8 to UCS-2, mangling the character stream. In my case (as with many others I found in my research) this surfaces when the system attempts to serialize/deserialize these strings as JSON objects. In the conversion, you can end up with character sequences which are invalid UTF-8. When browsers see these broken strings come in, they promptly drop the connection mid-stream, apparently as a security measure. (I sort-of understand this, but would have a hard time explaining it, because these character-encoding discussions give me a headache).

Community
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avcajaraville
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  • Thanks! But, what if I don't even want the actual hebrew text? **I just want to check if the array is empty or not**. Can I parse the JSON alternatively ? – batman191 Jul 19 '14 at 13:04
  • For that, the problem on your code is the condition: (data.length != 0) -> an empty array in JavaScript is true, so your test is wrong, try checking this way if (data.length !== 0), this way, you are actually asking for data's length attribute. You were doing the following, asking for data.length, which is always true for an array, and the JS makes automatically convertion and comperating 1 != 0 which is false. That its why it was failing when checking if array was empty. – avcajaraville Jul 20 '14 at 22:10