punch – fix-utf8 generator hook

This generator hook will help you fix broken encoding when you generated some non HTML text file (i.e. xml, json…).

Use-case

I've met this case when trying to generate a rss.xml file using a content-handler, there's an issue for that but here is a "user-land" fix.

This concerns every file generated from content handlers and not having .html extension, as punch will use binary encoding in those cases, and writing text with this encoding will result in iso-8859-1 files (your call, Node).

Installation

npm install punch-fix-utf8

Usage

In your config.json:

{
	"plugins": {
		"generator_hooks": {
			"fix_utf8": "./fix-utf8-hook"
		}
	},
	"utf8_paths": [
		"/path/to/file.xml"
	]
}

Just provide in utf8_paths the list of paths that should be re-encoded using utf8 encoding instead of binary.

How does it work?

This will simply fs.writeFile(…, fs.readFile(…, 'binary'), 'utf8').

To avoid re-encoding to UTF-8 each time you regenerate your pages (which would break your files, again) a .fix-utf8.done file is kept in your output directory. If file is updated, it will be fixed again. If you remove output and generate again, it will be fixed. If you just regenerate and file is not touched, it won't be re-encoded.