Feature request: automatic string decoding for writable streams

[mscdex]

• Version: all
• Platform: n/a
• Subsystem: stream

It would be nice if Writable streams had a configuration option to decode buffers to strings (using a StringDecoder instance). This is handy for example when writing a Transform stream that takes utf8 input.

Currently you have to set up your own StringDecoder instance and write the data through that first, which is kind of annoying. For non-multibyte encodings this isn't necessary though since you can just chunk.toString() inside your _write()/_transform() handler.

[Trott]

@nodejs/streams

[mcollina]

This would be very nice to have, if someone would like to take it. Happy to coach, but it is tricky to implement.

#7425 has an original implementation which we need to be rechecked for performance regressions. If there are none, we are 👍 .

A very important thing to do would be to document how to do the boilerplate. See https://github.com/mcollina/split2/blob/master/index.js as an example.

[mcollina]

See #15369.

[refack]

Put into https://github.com/nodejs/node/projects/13 backlog