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

Answer 1

(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 & 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 & creates a new ArrayBuffer
//  to store them in & 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 <-> 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 -> String (as byte array "list")
str = bufferToString(buf);
alert(str); // Alerts "7,0,4,..."

// 1. String (as byte array) -> 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 < len ; ++idx ) {
        arr[ idx ] = str.charCodeAt(idx) & 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 & back to ArrayBuffer again, where the string may be stored in eg. .localStorage :)

Hope this helps,

Dan