Understanding Node.js Buffers: Beyond the String Barrier
As a software engineer working with Node.js, you quickly become accustomed to JavaScript's string-centric view of text. Strings are Unicode-encoded, flexible, and generally intuitive for handling human-readable text. But what happens when you step outside the comfortable world of text and into the realm of raw, untyped binary data? This is where Node.js's Buffers come into play. Buffers are a fundamental global class in Node.js, designed to handle raw binary data directly. Unlike JavaScript strings, which are immutable sequences of characters, Buffers are like fixed-size arrays of integers, where each integer represents a byte of data. Understanding Buffers is crucial because they are the bridge between Node.js's JavaScript environment and the lower-level operations of the operating system and network. Why Do We Need Buffers? The Binary Imperative You might ask, "Why can't I just use strings for everything?" The answer lies in the nature of data: Raw Binary ...