Converting between strings and ArrayBuffers

Question

Is there a commonly accepted technique for efficiently converting JavaScript strings to ArrayBuffers and vice-versa  Specifically  I d like to be able to write the contents of an ArrayBuffer to localStorage and to read it back

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I d recommend NOT using deprecated APIs like BlobBuilder  BlobBuilder has long been deprecated by the Blob object  Compare the code in Dennis  answer  mdash  where BlobBuilder is used  mdash  with the code below   function arrayBufferGen str  cb       var b   new Blob  str      var f   new FileReader       f onload   function e        cb e target result          f readAsArrayBuffer b        Note how much cleaner and less bloated this is compared to the deprecated method    Yeah  this is definitely something to consider here

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var decoder   new TextDecoder     var string   decoder decode  arrayBuffer     See https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web API TextDecoder decode

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Update Please see the 2nd half of this answer  where I have  hopefully  provided a more complete solution    I also ran into this issue  the following works for me in FF 6  for one direction    var buf   new ArrayBuffer  10    var view   new Uint8Array  buf    view  3     4  alert Array prototype slice call view  join         Unfortunately  of course  you end up with ASCII text representations of the values in the array  rather than characters  It still  should be  much more efficient than a loop  though  eg  For the example above  the result is 0004000000  rather than several null chars  amp  a chr 4    Edit   After looking on MDC here  you may create an ArrayBuffer from an Array as follows   var arr   new Array 23      New Uint8Array   converts the Array elements     to Uint8s  amp  creates a new ArrayBuffer     to store them in  amp  a corresponding view      To get at the generated ArrayBuffer      you can then access it as below  with the  buffer property var buf   new Uint8Array  arr   buffer    To answer your original question  this allows you to convert ArrayBuffer  lt -  String as follows   var buf  view  str  buf   new ArrayBuffer  256    view   new Uint8Array  buf     view  0     7     Some dummy values view  2     4              1  Buffer - gt  String  as byte array  list   str   bufferToString buf   alert str      Alerts  7 0 4          1  String  as byte array  - gt  Buffer     buf   stringToBuffer str   alert new Uint8Array  buf    2        Alerts  4      Converts any ArrayBuffer to a string      a comma-separated list of ASCII ordinals      NOT a string of characters from the ordinals     in the buffer elements  function bufferToString  buf         var view   new Uint8Array  buf        return Array prototype join call view             Converts a comma-separated ASCII ordinal string list     back to an ArrayBuffer  see note for bufferToString    function stringToBuffer  str         var arr   str split              view   new Uint8Array  arr        return view buffer      For convenience  here is a function for converting a raw Unicode String to an ArrayBuffer  will only work with ASCII one-byte characters   function rawStringToBuffer  str         var idx  len   str length  arr   new Array  len        for   idx   0   idx  lt  len     idx             arr  idx     str charCodeAt idx   amp  0xFF               You may create an ArrayBuffer from a standard array  of values  as follows      return new Uint8Array  arr   buffer        Alerts  97  alert new Uint8Array  rawStringToBuffer  abc      0       The above allow you to go from ArrayBuffer -  String  amp  back to ArrayBuffer again  where the string may be stored in eg   localStorage     Hope this helps   Dan

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For node js and also for browsers using https   github com feross buffer  function ab2str buf  Uint8Array      return Buffer from buf  toString  base64      function str2ab str  string      return new Uint8Array Buffer from str   base64        Note  Solutions here didn t work for me  I need to support node js and browsers and just serialize UInt8Array to a string  I could serialize it as a number   but that occupies unnecessary space  With that solution I don t need to worry about encodings since it s base64  Just in case other people struggle with the same problem    My two cents

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Although Dennis and gengkev solutions of using Blob FileReader work  I wouldn t suggest taking that approach  It is an async approach to a simple problem  and it is much slower than a direct solution  I ve made a post in html5rocks with a simpler and  much faster  solution   http   updates html5rocks com 2012 06 How-to-convert-ArrayBuffer-to-and-from-String  And the solution is   function ab2str buf      return String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint16Array buf       function str2ab str      var buf   new ArrayBuffer str length 2      2 bytes for each char   var bufView   new Uint16Array buf     for  var i 0  strLen str length  i lt strLen  i          bufView i    str charCodeAt i         return buf        EDIT   The Encoding API helps solving the string conversion problem  Check out the response from Jeff Posnik on Html5Rocks com to the above original article   Excerpt      The Encoding API makes it simple to translate between raw bytes and native JavaScript strings  regardless of which of the many standard encodings you need to work with     lt pre id  results  gt  lt  pre gt    lt script gt    if   TextDecoder  in window           The local files to be fetched  mapped to the encoding that they re using      var filesToEncoding            utf8 bin    utf-8          utf16le bin    utf-16le          macintosh bin    macintosh              Object keys filesToEncoding  forEach function file          fetchAndDecode file  filesToEncoding file                else       document querySelector   results   textContent    Your browser does not support the Encoding API             Use XHR to fetch  file  and interpret its contents as being encoded with  encoding     function fetchAndDecode file  encoding        var xhr   new XMLHttpRequest        xhr open  GET   file          Using  arraybuffer  as the responseType ensures that the raw data is returned         rather than letting XMLHttpRequest decode the data first      xhr responseType    arraybuffer       xhr onload   function           if  this status    200               The decode   method takes a DataView as a parameter  which is a wrapper on top of the ArrayBuffer          var dataView   new DataView this response              The TextDecoder interface is documented at http   encoding spec whatwg org  interface-textdecoder         var decoder   new TextDecoder encoding           var decodedString   decoder decode dataView              Add the decoded file s text to the  lt pre gt  element on the page          document querySelector   results   textContent    decodedString     n           else           console error  Error while requesting   file  this                      xhr send         lt  script gt

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The following is a working Typescript implementation  bufferToString buffer  ArrayBuffer   string       return String fromCharCode apply null  Array from new Uint16Array buffer        stringToBuffer value  string   ArrayBuffer       let buffer   new ArrayBuffer value length   2      2 bytes per char     let view   new Uint16Array buffer       for  let i   0  length   value length  i  lt  length  i              view i    value charCodeAt i             return buffer     I ve used this for numerous operations while working with crypto subtle

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See here  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web JavaScript Typed arrays StringView  a C-like interface for strings based upon the JavaScript ArrayBuffer interface

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Well  here s a somewhat convoluted way of doing the same thing   var string    Blah blah blah   output  var bb   new  window BlobBuilder  window WebKitBlobBuilder  window MozBlobBuilder     bb append string   var f   new FileReader    f onload   function e         do whatever   output   e target result    f readAsArrayBuffer bb getBlob       Edit  BlobBuilder has long been deprecated in favor of the Blob constructor  which did not exist when I first wrote this post  Here s an updated version   And yes  this has always been a very silly way to do the conversion  but it was just for fun    var string    Blah blah blah   output  var f   new FileReader    f onload   function e         do whatever   output   e target result     f readAsArrayBuffer new Blob  string

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In case you have binary data in a string  obtained from nodejs   readFile       binary    or cypress   cy fixture       binary    etc   you can t use TextEncoder  It supports only utf8  Bytes with values  gt   128 are each turned into 2 bytes   ES2015   a   Uint8Array from s  x   gt  x charCodeAt 0     Uint8Array 33   2  134  140  186  82  70  108  182  233  40  143  247  29  76  245  206  29  87  48  160  78  225  242  56  236  201  80  80  152  118  92  144  48  s   String fromCharCode apply null  a       RFl       L    W0  N    8    PPv 0

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if you used huge array example arr length 1000000 you can this code to avoid stack callback problems   function ab2str buf    var bufView   new Uint16Array buf   var unis     for  var i   0  i  lt  bufView length  i          unis unis String fromCharCode bufView i      return unis     reverse function  mangini answer  from top   function str2ab str        var buf   new ArrayBuffer str length 2      2 bytes for each char     var bufView   new Uint16Array buf       for  var i 0  strLen str length  i lt strLen  i              bufView i    str charCodeAt i             return buf

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Let s say you have an arrayBuffer binaryStr   let text   String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint8Array binaryStr      and then you assign the text to the state

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All the following is about getting binary strings from array buffers  I d recommend not to use  var binaryString   String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint8Array arrayBuffer      because it   crashes on big buffers  somebody wrote about  magic  size of 246300 but I got Maximum call stack size exceeded error on 120000 bytes buffer  Chrome 29   it has really poor performance  see below    If you exactly need synchronous solution use something like  var   binaryString         bytes   new Uint8Array arrayBuffer     length   bytes length  for  var i   0  i  lt  length  i        binaryString    String fromCharCode bytes i        it is as slow as the previous one but works correctly  It seems that at the moment of writing this there is no quite fast synchronous solution for that problem  all libraries mentioned in this topic uses the same approach for their synchronous features    But what I really recommend is using Blob   FileReader approach  function readBinaryStringFromArrayBuffer  arrayBuffer  onSuccess  onFail      var reader   new FileReader      reader onload   function  event        onSuccess event target result          reader onerror   function  event        onFail event target error          reader readAsBinaryString new Blob   arrayBuffer          type   application octet-stream           the only disadvantage  not for all  is that it is asynchronous  And it is about 8-10 times faster then previous solutions   Some details  synchronous solution on my environment took 950-1050 ms for 2 4Mb buffer but solution with FileReader had times about 100-120 ms for the same amount of data  And I have tested both synchronous solutions on 100Kb buffer and they have taken almost the same time  so loop is not much slower the using  apply     BTW here  How to convert ArrayBuffer to and from String author compares two approaches like me and get completely opposite results  his test code is here  Why so different results  Probably because of his test string that is 1Kb long  he called it  veryLongStr    My buffer was a really big JPEG image of size 2 4Mb

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The  native  binary string that atob   returns is a 1-byte-per-character Array   So we shouldn t store 2 byte into a character   var arrayBufferToString   function buffer      return String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint8Array buffer       var stringToArrayBuffer   function str      return  new Uint8Array    map call str function x  return x charCodeAt 0      buffer

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I used this and works for me   function arrayBufferToBase64  buffer         var binary           var bytes   new Uint8Array  buffer        var len   bytes byteLength      for  var i   0  i  lt  len  i              binary    String fromCharCode  bytes  i                return window btoa  binary         function base64ToArrayBuffer base64        var binary string    window atob base64       var len   binary string length      var bytes   new Uint8Array  len        for  var i   0  i  lt  len  i                     bytes i    binary string charCodeAt i             return bytes buffer

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Yes   const encstr     TextEncoder  in window    new TextEncoder   encode str    Uint8Array from str  c   gt  c codePointAt 0

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From emscripten  function stringToUTF8Array str  outU8Array  outIdx  maxBytesToWrite      if    maxBytesToWrite  gt  0   return 0    var startIdx   outIdx    var endIdx   outIdx   maxBytesToWrite - 1    for  var i   0  i  lt  str length    i        var u   str charCodeAt i       if  u  gt   55296  amp  amp  u  lt   57343          var u1   str charCodeAt   i         u   65536     u  amp  1023   lt  lt  10    u1  amp  1023           if  u  lt   127          if  outIdx  gt   endIdx  break        outU8Array outIdx      u       else if  u  lt   2047          if  outIdx   1  gt   endIdx  break        outU8Array outIdx      192   u  gt  gt  6        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  amp  63       else if  u  lt   65535          if  outIdx   2  gt   endIdx  break        outU8Array outIdx      224   u  gt  gt  12        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  gt  gt  6  amp  63        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  amp  63       else         if  outIdx   3  gt   endIdx  break        outU8Array outIdx      240   u  gt  gt  18        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  gt  gt  12  amp  63        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  gt  gt  6  amp  63        outU8Array outIdx      128   u  amp  63             outU8Array outIdx    0    return outIdx - startIdx    Use like  stringToUTF8Array  abs   new Uint8Array 3   0  4

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I found I had problems with this approach  basically because I was trying to write the output to a file and it was non encoded properly  Since JS seems to use UCS-2 encoding  source  source   we need to stretch this solution a step further  here s my enhanced solution that works to me   I had no difficulties with generic text  but when it was down to Arab or Korean  the output file didn t have all the chars but instead was showing error characters   File output      10k unit     Follow          Y      Follow   screen name      screen name U                Tweet             Tweet   hashtag      hashtag             Y      Tweet to   name      name U   x        Y      ko     followers count  followers     followers count    X       100K    100   t     10k unit          Follow        Follow   screen name      screen name        X0  K      M  1    Tweet       Tweet   hashtag      hashtag    Original      10k unit      Follow           Follow   screen name      screen name          Tweet         Tweet   hashtag      hashtag            Tweet to   name      name             ko     followers count  followers     followers count          100K    100       10k unit         Follow        Follow   screen name      screen name           K     M      Tweet       Tweet   hashtag      hashtag    I took the information from dennis  solution and this post I found   Here s my code   function encode utf8 s      return unescape encodeURIComponent s       function decode utf8 s      return decodeURIComponent escape s        function ab2str buf       var s   String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint8Array buf       return decode utf8 decode utf8 s       function str2ab str       var s   encode utf8 str     var buf   new ArrayBuffer s length       var bufView   new Uint8Array buf      for  var i 0  strLen s length  i lt strLen  i           bufView i    s charCodeAt i           return bufView       This allows me to save the content to a file without encoding problems   How it works   It basically takes the single 8-byte chunks composing a UTF-8 character and saves them as single characters  therefore an UTF-8 character built in this way  could be composed by 1-4 of these characters   UTF-8 encodes characters in a format that variates from 1 to 4 bytes in length  What we do here is encoding the sting in an URI component and then take this component and translate it in the corresponding 8 byte character  In this way we don t lose the information given by UTF8 characters that are more than 1 byte long

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stringToArrayBuffer byteString        var byteArray   new Uint8Array byteString length       for  var i   0  i  lt  byteString length  i            byteArray i    byteString codePointAt i             return byteArray        arrayBufferToString buffer        var byteArray   new Uint8Array buffer       var byteString           for  var i   0  i  lt  byteArray byteLength  i            byteString    String fromCodePoint byteArray i              return byteString

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After playing with mangini s solution for converting from ArrayBuffer to String - ab2str  which is the most elegant and useful one I have found - thanks    I had some issues when handling large arrays  More specefivally  calling String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint16Array buf    throws an error    arguments array passed to Function prototype apply is too large   In order to solve it  bypass  I have decided to handle the input ArrayBuffer in chunks  So the modified solution is   function ab2str buf       var str          var ab   new Uint16Array buf      var abLen   ab length     var CHUNK SIZE   Math pow 2  16      var offset  len  subab     for  offset   0  offset  lt  abLen  offset    CHUNK SIZE          len   Math min CHUNK SIZE  abLen-offset         subab   ab subarray offset  offset len         str    String fromCharCode apply null  subab           return str      The chunk size is set to 2 16 because this was the size I have found to work in my development  landscape  Setting a higher value caused the same error to reoccur  It can be altered by setting the CHUNK SIZE variable to a different value  It is important to have an even number   Note on performance - I did not make any performance tests for this solution  However  since it is based on the previous solution  and can handle large arrays  I see no reason why not to use it

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Based on the answer of gengkev  I created functions for both ways  because BlobBuilder can handle String and ArrayBuffer   function string2ArrayBuffer string  callback        var bb   new BlobBuilder        bb append string       var f   new FileReader        f onload   function e            callback e target result             f readAsArrayBuffer bb getBlob         and  function arrayBuffer2String buf  callback        var bb   new BlobBuilder        bb append buf       var f   new FileReader        f onload   function e            callback e target result            f readAsText bb getBlob         A simple test   string2ArrayBuffer  abc       function  buf            var uInt8   new Uint8Array buf           console log uInt8      Returns  Uint8Array   0 97  1 98  2 99            arrayBuffer2String buf               function  string                    console log string      returns  abc

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You can use TextEncoder and TextDecoder from the Encoding standard  which is polyfilled by the stringencoding library  to convert string to and from ArrayBuffers   var uint8array   new TextEncoder   encode string   var string   new TextDecoder encoding  decode uint8array

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Update 2016 - five years on there are now new methods in the specs  see support below  to convert between strings and typed arrays using proper encoding   TextEncoder  The TextEncoder represents      The TextEncoder interface represents an encoder for a specific method    that is a specific character encoding  like utf-8  iso-8859-2  koi8    cp1261  gbk      An encoder takes a stream of code points as input and   emits a stream of bytes    Change note since the above was written   ibid       Note  Firefox  Chrome and Opera used to have support for encoding   types other than utf-8  such as utf-16  iso-8859-2  koi8  cp1261  and   gbk   As of Firefox 48        Chrome 54       and Opera 41  no   other encoding types are available other than utf-8  in order to match   the spec        Updated specs  W3  and here  whatwg    After creating an instance of the TextEncoder it will take a string and encode it using a given encoding parameter    x000D   x000D  if     TextEncoder  in window    x000D    alert  Sorry  this browser does not support TextEncoder       x000D   x000D  var enc   new TextEncoder       always utf-8 x000D  console log enc encode  This is a string converted to a Uint8Array     x000D   x000D   x000D    You then of course use the  buffer parameter on the resulting Uint8Array to convert the underlaying ArrayBuffer to a different view if needed   Just make sure that the characters in the string adhere to the encoding schema  for example  if you use characters outside the UTF-8 range in the example they will be encoded to two bytes instead of one   For general use you would use UTF-16 encoding for things like localStorage   TextDecoder  Likewise  the opposite process uses the TextDecoder      The TextDecoder interface represents a decoder for a specific method    that is a specific character encoding  like utf-8  iso-8859-2  koi8    cp1261  gbk      A decoder takes a stream of bytes as input and emits   a stream of code points    All available decoding types can be found here    x000D   x000D  if     TextDecoder  in window   x000D    alert  Sorry  this browser does not support TextDecoder       x000D   x000D  var enc   new TextDecoder  utf-8    x000D  var arr   new Uint8Array  84 104 105 115 32 105 115 32 97 32 85 105 110 116  x000D                            56 65 114 114 97 121 32 99 111 110 118 101 114 116  x000D                            101 100 32 116 111 32 97 32 115 116 114 105 110 103    x000D  console log enc decode arr    x000D   x000D   x000D    The MDN StringView library  An alternative to these is to use the StringView library  licensed as lgpl-3 0  which goal is         to create a C-like interface for strings  i e   an array of character codes     an ArrayBufferView in JavaScript  based upon the   JavaScript ArrayBuffer interface   to create a highly extensible library that anyone can extend by adding methods to the object StringView prototype   to create a collection of methods for such string-like objects  since now  stringViews  which work strictly on arrays of numbers   rather than on creating new immutable JavaScript strings   to work with Unicode encodings other than JavaScript s default UTF-16 DOMStrings      giving much more flexibility  However  it would require us to link to or embed this library while TextEncoder TextDecoder is being built-in in modern browsers   Support  As of July 2018   TextEncoder  Experimental  On Standard Track    Chrome      Edge        Firefox     IE          Opera       Safari  ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------      38                     19            -           25          -   Chrome A    Edge mob    Firefox A   Opera A    Safari iOS   Webview A  ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------      38                     19                        -           38      18  Firefox 18 implemented an earlier and slightly different version of the specification   WEB WORKER SUPPORT   Experimental  On Standard Track   Chrome      Edge        Firefox     IE          Opera       Safari  ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------      38                      20          -           25          -   Chrome A    Edge mob    Firefox A   Opera A    Safari iOS   Webview A  ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----------- -----------      38                      20                      -           38  Data from MDN -  npm i -g mdncomp  by epistemex

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Blob is much slower than String fromCharCode null array    but that fails if the array buffer gets too big  The best solution I have found is to use String fromCharCode null array   and split it up into operations that won t blow the stack  but are faster than a single char at a time   The best solution for large array buffer is   function arrayBufferToString buffer        var bufView   new Uint16Array buffer       var length   bufView length      var result           var addition   Math pow 2 16 -1       for var i   0 i lt length i  addition            if i   addition  gt  length               addition   length - i                    result    String fromCharCode apply null  bufView subarray i i addition               return result       I found this to be about 20 times faster than using blob  It also works for large strings of over 100mb

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Unlike the solutions here  I needed to convert to from UTF-8 data  For this purpose  I coded the following two functions  using the  un escape  en decodeURIComponent trick  They re pretty wasteful of memory  allocating 9 times the length of the encoded utf8-string  though those should be recovered by gc  Just don t use them for 100mb text   function utf8AbFromStr str        var strUtf8   unescape encodeURIComponent str        var ab   new Uint8Array strUtf8 length       for  var i   0  i  lt  strUtf8 length  i              ab i    strUtf8 charCodeAt i             return ab     function strFromUtf8Ab ab        return decodeURIComponent escape String fromCharCode apply null  ab         Checking that it works   strFromUtf8Ab utf8AbFromStr  latin        a   de           - gt   latin        a   de

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Recently I also need to do this for one of my project so did a well research and got a result from Google s Developer community which states this in a simple manner  For ArrayBuffer to String function ab2str buf      return String fromCharCode apply null  new Uint16Array buf         Here Uint16 can be different like Uinit8 Uint32 depending upon your buffer value type   For String to ArrayBuffer function str2ab str      var buf   new ArrayBuffer str length 2      2 bytes for each char   var bufView   new Uint16Array buf     for  var i 0  strLen str length  i  lt  strLen  i          bufView i    str charCodeAt i         return buf      Same here also for the Uint16Array   For more in detail reference you can refer this blog by Google

[javascript] Converting between strings and ArrayBuffers

I'd recommend NOT using deprecated APIs like BlobBuilder

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