Node.js buffer string serialization

Question

I want to serialize a buffer to string without any overhead ( one character for one byte) and be able to unserialize it into buffer again.

var b = new Buffer (4) ;
var s = b.toString() ;
var b2 = new Buffer (s) 

Produces the same results only for values below 128. I want to use the whole scope of 0-255.

I know I can write it in a loop with String.fromCharCode() in serializing and String.charCodeAt() in deserializing, but I'm looking for some native module implementation if there is any.

Answer 1

You can use the 'latin1' encoding, but you should generally try to avoid it because converting a Buffer to a binary string has some extra computational overhead.

Example:

var b = Buffer.alloc(4);
var s = b.toString('latin1');
var b2 = Buffer.from(s, 'latin1');