[suggestion] Specify encoding

[franky47]

The Shortcomings sections mentions:

Importing text with an encoding defined within JavaScript
will require importing it as an Uint8Array,
and explicitly decoding it:

import uint8array from "path/to/file.txt" with { type: "bytes" };
let text = new TextDecoder("utf-16le").decode(uint8array);

Would it be possible to specify the encoding as part of the with block?

import text from "path/to/file.txt" with { type: "text", encoding: "utf-16le" }

[sffc]

Node.js, Python 3, Java, Rust, etc., all have an option to specify the encoding when reading files, or when converting from a buffer to a string.

Node.js:

// Reading a file
fs.readFile('/Users/joe/test.txt', 'utf8', /* ... */);

// Buffer to string
buf.toString('utf-8')

Python 3:

# Reading a file
f = open('workfile', 'w', encoding="utf-8")

# Buffer to string
s = bytes.decode(encoding='utf-8', errors='strict')

Importing a data file with the module system is uncommon, and even less common to interpret it as text, so there is less precedent here. The examples I could find:

• Rust has include_str!, whose definition is: "Includes a UTF-8 encoded file as a string." I may have named it include_utf8! instead, but I do appreciate the authors understanding that text encoding is fundamental to this problem space and highlighting it in the docs.
• Go has go:embed which can embed data into a string. I couldn't find docs on how it deals with encoding.
• (these are all I could conclusively find; some like Zig and C23 have byte imports, but not text imports)