Golang: Read buffered input as signed 16bit ints

Question

I am trying to read a buffered stream of signed 16 bit integers (wav format), but the bufio.Read method only accepts an array of bytes. My question is a 2-parter:

1. Can I preformat the byte stream into a buffered int16 array?

2. If I can't, whats the best way of post-processing the byte array into int16 array? My initial thought is to use tmp arrays and keep pushing/processing them, but I was curious if there was a more idiomatic way of doing this?

   package main
   
   import (
        "bufio"
        "io"
        "log"
        "os/exec"
   )
   
   func main() {
   
       app := "someapp"
   
       cmd := exec.Command(app)
       stdout, err := cmd.StdoutPipe()
       r := bufio.NewReader(stdout)
       if err != nil {
           log.Fatal(err)
       }
       if err := cmd.Start(); err != nil {
           log.Fatal(err)
       }
   
       //"someapp" outputs signed 16bit integers (little endian))
       buf := make([]byte, 0, 4*1024)
   
       for {
           n, err := r.Read(buf[:cap(buf)])    //r.Read only accepts type []byte
           buf = buf[:n]
           if n == 0 {
               if err == nil {
                   continue
               }
               if err == io.EOF {
                   break
               }
               log.Fatal(err)
           }
   
           log.Printf("%x\n", buf)
           //process buf here
   
           if err != nil && err != io.EOF {
               log.Fatal(err)
           }
       }
   }
   

Answer 1

When working with IO, you always work with []bytes, there's no way to substitute that with []int16, or pre-format that as int16s, it's always a stream of bytes.

You can look at the encoding/binary package to decode this stream.

// to get the first uint16 as i
i := binary.LittleEndian.Uint16(buf[:2])

You can then iterate through the buf as needed.

You can also use binary.Read to read directly from the io.Reader.

var i uint16
for {
    err := binary.Read(r, binary.LittleEndian, &i)
    if err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        break
    }
    fmt.Println(i)
}

It may worth noting the simplicity of what needs to be done. Each uint16 is created via:

func (littleEndian) Uint16(b []byte) uint16 {
    return uint16(b[0]) | uint16(b[1])<<8
}

Answer 2

You can use encoding/binary.Read to fill an []int16 directly from your reader, although technically the answer to your first question is still no (check the source of binary.Read, it reads the data to a []byte first).