For the RadioLogic project started two years ago, I needed a DICOM parser supporting UTF8 encoded data.
RadioLogic is a teaching and assessment tool for radiologists, work in progress. It's a webapp optimized for use on iPAD's.
In a first step I succesfully patched Chris Hafey's distribution file dicomParser.js to parse the RadioLogic teaching files.
In a second step I modified the source files to document the changes and to build new distribution files. This approach is described in the present wiki page First Approach.
Following feedback from Chris Hafey and the cornerstone-platform community, I am currently creating a separate decoding module to support not only UTF8, but also other DICOM character set encodings.