The official node.js documentation for Buffer is the best place to check for something like this. As previously noted, Buffer currently supports these encodings: 'ascii', 'utf8', 'utf16le'/'ucs2', 'base64', 'base64url', 'latin1'/'binary', and 'hex'.

Single Buffer

If you have a single Buffer you can use its toString method that will convert all or part of the binary contents to a string using a specific encoding. It defaults to utf8 if you don't provide a parameter, but I've explicitly set the encoding in this example.

var req = http.request(reqOptions, function(res) {
    ...

    res.on('data', function(chunk) {
        var textChunk = chunk.toString('utf8');
        // process utf8 text chunk
    });
});

Streamed Buffers

If you have streamed buffers like in the question above where the first byte of a multi-byte UTF8-character may be contained in the first Buffer (chunk) and the second byte in the second Buffer then you should use a StringDecoder. :

var StringDecoder = require('string_decoder').StringDecoder;

var req = http.request(reqOptions, function(res) {
    ...
    var decoder = new StringDecoder('utf8');

    res.on('data', function(chunk) {
        var textChunk = decoder.write(chunk);
        // process utf8 text chunk
    });
});

This way bytes of incomplete characters are buffered by the StringDecoder until all required bytes were written to the decoder.