Converting a Buffer to JSON and Utf8 Strings in Nodejs
Nodejs and browser based JavaScript differ because Node has a way to handle binary data even before the ES6 draft came up with ArrayBuffer. In Node, Buffer class is the primary data structure used with most I/O operations. It is a raw binary data that is allocated outside the V8 heap and once allocated, cannot be resized.
Before Nodejs v6.0, to create a new buffer you could just call the constructor function with new keyword:
To create a new buffer instance, in latest and current stable releases of Node:
The new Buffer() constructor have been deprecated and replaced by separate Buffer.from(), Buffer.alloc(), and Buffer.allocUnsafe() methods.
More information can be read through official documentation.
Convert a Buffer to JSON
Buffers can convert to JSON.
The JSON specifies that the type of object being transformed is a Buffer, and its data.
Convert JSON to Buffer
Convert Buffer to Utf-8 String
.toString() is not the only way to convert a buffer to a string. Also, it by defaults converts to a utf-8 format string.
The other way to convert a buffer to a string is using StringDecoder core module from Nodejs API.
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