Chapter 3. Buffers: Working with bits, bytes, and encodings
This chapter covers
- Introduction to the Buffer data type
- Changing data encodings
- Converting binary files to JSON
- Creating your own binary protocol
JavaScript has historically had subpar binary support. Typically, parsing binary data would involve various tricks with strings to extract the data you want. Not having a good mechanism to work with raw memory in JavaScript was one of the problems Node core developers had to tackle when the project started getting traction. This was mostly for performance reasons. All of the raw memory accumulated in the Buffer data type.
Buffers are raw allocations of the heap, exposed to JavaScript in an array-like manner. They’re exposed globally ...
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