Buffer

A Buffer is an in-memory collection of raw bytes.

• The Buffer class lets us access these spaces of memory, thereby allowing us to work with binary data.

a Buffer is similar to an array of integers, but corresponds to a raw memory allocation outside the V8 heap.

• Unlike arrays, you cannot change the size of a buffer once it is created.

Because computers store data in bytes, a simple way to think of a Buffer is to think of it as an array of bytes:

const buffer = [11111111, 11011001, 10010001]

Buffers are useful when you’re interacting with binary data, usually at lower networking levels.

The Buffer class can set its encoding so we can put a String into it. This enables it to translate from String of UTF16 characters into an array of bytes. Once you have a String in byte form you can use it in computing communication.

• In Javascript, a String is a collection of characters in UTF16 encoding.
  • Under UTF16 encoding a single character may consist of multiple bytes (at least one, usually not more than four)

When we read from a file with fs.readFile(), the data returned to the Promise (or callback) is a buffer object. When we make HTTP requests in Node, they return data streams that are temporarily stored in an internal buffer when the client cannot process the stream all at once.

Encoding

Node supports the following encodings: ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, USC-2, Base64, Hexadecimal, binary (ISO/IEC 8859-1)

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Children

1. Cook

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Backlinks

• Binary
• Encoding