// Prints: <Buffer 66 00 68 00 71 00 77 00 68 00 67 00 61 00 64 00 73 00>

```

Node.js buffers accept all case variations of encoding strings that they

receive. For example, UTF-8 can be specified as `'utf8'`, `'UTF8'` or `'uTf8'`.

The character encodings currently supported by Node.js are the following:

* `'utf8'`: Multi-byte encoded Unicode characters. Many web pages and other

document formats use [UTF-8][]. This is the default character encoding.

When decoding a `Buffer` into a string that does not exclusively contain

valid UTF-8 data, the Unicode replacement character `U+FFFD` � will be used

to represent those errors.

* `'utf8'` (alias: `'utf-8'`): Multi-byte encoded Unicode characters. Many web

pages and other document formats use [UTF-8][]. This is the default character

encoding. When decoding a `Buffer` into a string that does not exclusively

contain valid UTF-8 data, the Unicode replacement character `U+FFFD` � will be

used to represent those errors.

* `'utf16le'`: Multi-byte encoded Unicode characters. Unlike `'utf8'`, each

character in the string will be encoded using either 2 or 4 bytes.

Node.js only supports the [little-endian][endianness] variant of [UTF-16][].

* `'utf16le'` (alias: `'utf-16le'`): Multi-byte encoded Unicode characters.

Unlike `'utf8'`, each character in the string will be encoded using either 2

or 4 bytes. Node.js only supports the [little-endian][endianness] variant of

[UTF-16][].

* `'latin1'`: Latin-1 stands for [ISO-8859-1][]. This character encoding only

supports the Unicode characters from `U+0000` to `U+00FF`. Each character is

* `'binary'`: Alias for `'latin1'`. See [binary strings][] for more background

on this topic. The name of this encoding can be very misleading, as all of the

encodings listed here convert between strings and binary data. For converting

between strings and `Buffer`s, typically `'utf-8'` is the right choice.

between strings and `Buffer`s, typically `'utf8'` is the right choice.

* `'ucs2'`: Alias of `'utf16le'`. UCS-2 used to refer to a variant of UTF-16

that did not support characters that had code points larger than U+FFFF.

In Node.js, these code points are always supported.

* `'ucs2'`, `'ucs-2'`: Aliases of `'utf16le'`. UCS-2 used to refer to a variant

of UTF-16 that did not support characters that had code points larger than

U+FFFF. In Node.js, these code points are always supported.

```js

Buffer.from('1ag', 'hex');

or `false` otherwise.

```js

console.log(Buffer.isEncoding('utf-8'));

console.log(Buffer.isEncoding('utf8'));

// Prints: true

console.log(Buffer.isEncoding('hex'));