Get the browser's highlighted text into a UTF8 encoded javascript string

Question

I'm new to javascript and do not have a good grasp of its unicode handling. If I understand correctly it's kind of like C/C++ where a string contains a binary sequence without any encoding info.

When I use something like var str=window.getSelection().toString() to get the highlighted text, will the resulting string have the same encoding as the web-page? If so, what's the best way of finding out that encoding and converting it to a unicode one (eg UTF8)?

Answer 1

Strings in Javascript are not like "strings" in C or PHP, which are actually byte arrays and have encoding semantics. Strings in Javascript are quite different than that and are like strings in Java/C# or Python's unicode type.

They are strings of abstract characters, at least if you don't try to have non-BMP characters. In practice, you don't have to worry about that, I am just mentioning it for completeness.

As per above, var str=window.getSelection().toString() does not have any encoding semantics, it's just a string of the characters that are selected. You don't state any actual problem in your question, but if you are wondering if "special" characters will just work in Javascript, well, they do just work.