Bytes

A storage-agnostic implementation of Node core's buffer API. Usable with Buffer, Uint8Array, and Array; or anything else that behaves like them.

Why?

The Web APIs around working with binary data are inadequate.

Annoyance 1: DataView defaults to big-endian, while most platforms (and file formats) use little-endian, and thus basically always requires the more verbose littleEndian argument, e.g: .getUint16( offset, true ).

Annoyance 2: A new DataView needs to be constructed for every ArrayBuffer you want to operate on, needlessly thrashing the heap. Sad performance face.

Annoyance 3: var dataView = new DataView( buffer ); dataView.getUint32( offset, true ) because not-invented-here and we-dont-want-to-copy-node buffer.readUInt32LE( offset ).

Annoyance 4: The boolean littleEndian argument in DataView methods (.getUint16( offset, littleEndian )) is limiting (middle-endian / mixed-endian anyone?), Node's Buffer API would be easily extended to cover that case through its use of suffixes (e.g. .readUInt32ME())

Usage

$ npm install --save @op.c/bytes

var bytes = require( '@op.c/bytes' )

API

Caveats

Array Types

To be as unrestrictive as possible, this library does not type-guard the buffers it operates on; its methods will work on anything that looks and behaves like an Array or TypedArray. Be aware of what you are doing, and what your inputs are.

Endianness / Byte-Order

Beware of (re-)using ArrayBuffers from TypedArrays that have an element size larger than a byte (i.e. everything other than U/Int8Array & U/Int8ClampedArray); their contents are platform byte-order dependent.