Reading a binary file from Google Drive using node.js

Question

I'm running into a problem getting a binary from Drive using the API, I keep going in circles.

Here are the relevant code bits:

// Load client secrets from a local file.
fs.readFile('client_secret.json', function processClientSecrets(err, content) {
  if (err) {
    console.log('Error loading client secret file: ' + err);
    return;
  }
  // Authorize a client with the loaded credentials, then call the
  // Drive API.
  oauth.authorize(JSON.parse(content), dasm.init, driveapi.getFile)
});

driveapi.getFile:

function getFile(auth, cb) {
  var service = google.drive('v3');
  service.files.get({
    auth: auth,
    pageSize: 20,
    fileId: "0B2h-dgPh8_5CZE9WZVM4a3BxV00",
    alt: 'media'
  }, function(err, response) {
    if (err) {
      console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err);
      return;
    }
    cb(response)
  });
}

Now, response appears to be coming back as a string. When I try to convert to hex it goes nuts. Is there any way to to take response and get it into a Buffer? Or is it corrupted the sec I get it from service.files.get ?

By nuts, I mean that

console.log(
        arrData[0].charCodeAt(0).toString(2),
        '-',
        arrData[1].charCodeAt(0).toString(2),
        '-',
        arrData[2].charCodeAt(0).toString(2),
        '-',
        arrData[3].charCodeAt(0).toString(2),
        '-',
        arrData[4].charCodeAt(0).toString(2)
    )

= 1001101 - 1011010 - 1111111111111101 - 0 - 11 (I'm using binary to try to see what is broken)

The correct hex would be 4D 5A 90 00 03

Edit: For those who are confused, like I was, how 90 became fffd it's the Unicode replacement character that gets displayed when the value doesn't map to an ASCII char.

Answer 1

Was able to solve this, finally. Google APIs use the request module, and you can apply any options that it accepts. For reference, you will need to set [encoding: null]2, as any other option will pass the response though toString, thus ruining it if you are working with binary data.

Working code is located below:

function getFile(auth, cb) {
  var service = google.drive({
    version: 'v3', 
    encoding: null
  });
  service.files.get({
    auth: auth,
    fileId: "0B2h-dgPh8_5CZE9WZVM4a3BxV00",
    alt: 'media'
  }, function(err, response) {
    if (err) {
      console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err);
      return;
    }
    cb(response)
  });
}