Nodejs binary http stream

Question

I need to stream files from a client (nodejs command line) and a server (express nodejs).

This is the client side:

var request = require('request');
var fs = require('fs');

// ...

  var readStream = fs.createReadStream(file.path);
  readStream.on('end', function() {
    that.emit('finished');
  });
  readStream.pipe(request.post(target));

// ...

This is the server side:

var fs = require('fs');
var path = require('path');

// ...

    app.post('/:filename', function(req, res) {
      req.setEncoding('binary');
      var filename = path.basename(req.params.filename);
      filename = path.resolve(destinationDir, filename);
      var dst = fs.createWriteStream(filename);
      req.pipe(dst);
      req.on('end', function() {
        res.send(200);
      });
    });

// ...

All is working, files are saved correctly on the server side... but they are about 50% bigger than the source files. I tried to see difference between the two files with hexdump and the server side file has similar content but with 0xC2 sometimes. I guess this is related to encoding.

Answer 1

Don't call req.setEncoding('binary').

This will convert every single chunk into strings and is mainly intended if you want to read strings from the stream. As you directly pipe the request to a file, you don't need to do it.