Hey all - there seems to be a bit of a disparity with the docs and the code... http://nodejs.org/api/stream.html#stream_stream_setencoding_encoding seems to indicate that any readable Stream will have a setEncoding function on it, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's explicitly created for file streams for example: https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/v0.6.19-release/lib/fs.js#L1093