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

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>

Answer 2

var decoder = new TextDecoder ();
var string = decoder.decode (arrayBuffer);

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/TextDecoder/decode

Answer 3

(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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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 < 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 < len; i++)        {
        bytes[i] = binary_string.charCodeAt(i);
    }
    return bytes.buffer;
}

Answer 6

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 < 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<strLen; i++) {
        bufView[i] = str.charCodeAt(i);
    }
    return buf;
}