parse-lfs-message

Convert a Live for Speed message to UTF-8

This module is designed to be used with NodeJS on the server with xi4n or as middleware for other LFS InSim applications. This module will parse any LFS message (chat message, nickname, server name etc.), converting encoded Windows codepage characters to UTF-8. This module leaves message colour encodings intact for processing later.

Install

# Install with Yarn
yarn add parse-lfs-message

# Install with NPM
npm i parse-lfs-message

Usage Example

You can run the example with yarn example or npm run example.

// Require parse-lfs-message module
const parseLFSMessage = require("parse-lfs-message");

// Simulate receiving messages from a buffer
const msg1 = Buffer.from("^72^45 ^7B2^J^4Ï^1 Ayoub", "binary");
const msg2 = Buffer.from("^405 ^J¢^7ϧ^4£ ^7TJ", "binary");

// Parse messages
const parsedMsg1 = parseLFSMessage(msg1);
const parsedMsg2 = parseLFSMessage(msg2);

console.log(parsedMsg1);
// Output: ^72^45 ^7B2^4ﾏ ^1Ayoub

console.log(parsedMsg2);
// Output: ^405 ｢^7ﾏｧ^4｣ ^7TJ

Options

parseLFSMessage accepts an optional second argument.

LFS messages can also contain an ^: control character, meaning "return to original colour and Latin-1 code page". Unlike ^8, ^: always switches back to Latin-1 (CP1252), regardless of the originalCodepage option. ^: is always rendered as ^9 in the output.

originalCodepage

LFS messages can contain an ^8 control character, meaning "return to original colour and code page". The originalCodepage option tells the parser which code page to switch back to when it encounters ^8. In the output, ^8 is always rendered as ^9, since they render as the same colour in LFS.

If not provided, it defaults to Latin-1 ("L").

For LFS output messages, the original code page can be read from the MSOData property of the IS_MSO packet.

const parsedMsg = parseLFSMessage(msg, { originalCodepage: "J" });

Valid values are:

Value	Code page
L	Latin-1 (CP1252)
G	Greek (CP1253)
C	Cyrillic (CP1251)
E	Central Europe (CP1250)
T	Turkish (CP1254)
B	Baltic (CP1257)
J	Japanese (Shift-JIS)
H	Traditional Chinese (Big5)
S	Simplified Chinese (GBK)
K	Korean (EUC-KR)