Converting between strings and ArrayBuffers
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
TextEncoderinterface represents an encoder for a specific method, that is a specific character encoding, likeutf-8,An encoder takes a stream of code points as input and emits a stream of bytes.iso-8859-2,koi8,cp1261,gbk, ...
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:
if (!("TextEncoder" in window)) alert("Sorry, this browser does not support TextEncoder...");var enc = new TextEncoder(); // always utf-8console.log(enc.encode("This is a string converted to a Uint8Array"));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
TextDecoderinterface represents a decoder for a specific method, that is a specific character encoding, likeutf-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.
if (!("TextDecoder" in window)) alert("Sorry, this browser does not support TextDecoder...");var enc = new TextDecoder("utf-8");var arr = new Uint8Array([84,104,105,115,32,105,115,32,97,32,85,105,110,116, 56,65,114,114,97,121,32,99,111,110,118,101,114,116, 101,100,32,116,111,32,97,32,115,116,114,105,110,103]);console.log(enc.decode(arr));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 versionof 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 | ? | - | 38Data from MDN - `npm i -g mdncomp` by epistemex
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<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.
<pre id="results"></pre><script> 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 <pre> element on the page. document.querySelector('#results').textContent += decodedString + '\n'; } else { console.error('Error while requesting', file, this); } }; xhr.send(); }</script>
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);