Why fatal option is not supported?

[khoanguyen-yang]

Hi,

I am wondering why the fatal option is not supported. Will setting fatal=true will cause any issue when using your library as a polyfill?

Many thanks

[samthor]

Setting fatal=true will cause the polyfill to fail since it's not supported.

I could probably add support, it wouldn't be too hard.

[khoanguyen-yang]

But it seems the fatal option is not used at all in the library

fatal is always set to false here https://github.com/samthor/fast-text-encoding/blob/master/src/o-decoder.js#L51
But the validation above it rejects the fatal option. https://github.com/samthor/fast-text-encoding/blob/master/src/o-decoder.js#L35
So wondering why you need the validation when you do not use it at all?

---

FYI, I am currently use your library to polyfill encoder/decoder in React Native and some other libraries do use the fatal option. I made a simple patch to disable only the validation (leaving this.fatal=false unchanged) and it seems to be working fine.
However I am not sure your library will work 100% ok for that change. So it would be nice if I have your confirmation or if you have time, you can make a change to the library if possible and necessary.

[pablodenadai]

Setting fatal=true will cause the polyfill to fail since it's not supported.
I could probably add support, it wouldn't be too hard.

That'd be awesome if you could add support for fatal. Otherwise please provide some guidance and I'll help implement it. Thanks!

[jupiterrosen]

@pablodenadai @samthor @khoanguyen-yang I'm also encountering this issue when integrating with solanaweb3js

[krisgrm]

yers please i need it also

[eduardhasanaj]

@samthor can you please let us know what is the status of this feature request?

[eduardhasanaj]

Till the pull request is approved you can use my branch

npm install github:eduardhasanaj/fast-text-encoding#add-fatal-option-support

[samthor]

The PR #29 doesn't cover all cases, i.e., it will not detect invalid UTF-8:

• it only covers one failure mode of UTF-8 encoding (it doesn't check continuation bytes) for the fallback code
• it doesn't support Node (Buffer does not throw, it generates U+FFFD characters for invalid input)

for folks on the thread, the two questions you need to ask are:

• do you actually want UTF-8 validation, or do you just have some upstream library that expects fatal to be supported
• why do you want this at all: modern Node and browsers do not need this polyfill (I wrote it in 2017!), and I'd go as far as saying including it is actively harmful.

[eduardhasanaj]

@samthor I agree that #29 does not cover all cases on detecting invalid utf-8 for the reasons you mentioned.

1. Some upstream library expects fatal mode to be supported.
2. I nedd this polyfill in React Native.