The nodejs Buffer
is pretty swell. However, it seems to be geared towards storing strings. The constructors either take a string, an array of bytes, or a size of bytes to allocate.
I am using version 0.4.12 of Node.js, and I want to store an integer in a buffer. Not integer.toString()
, but the actual bytes of the integer. Is there an easy way to do this without looping over the integer and doing some bit-twiddling? I could do that, but I feel like this is a problem someone else must have faced at some time.
Since it's not builtin 0.4.12 you could use something like this:
var integer = 1000;
var length = Math.ceil((Math.log(integer)/Math.log(2))/8); // How much byte to store integer in the buffer
var buffer = new Buffer(length);
var arr = []; // Use to create the binary representation of the integer
while (integer > 0) {
var temp = integer % 2;
arr.push(temp);
integer = Math.floor(integer/2);
}
console.log(arr);
var counter = 0;
var total = 0;
for (var i = 0,j = arr.length; i < j; i++) {
if (counter % 8 == 0 && counter > 0) { // Do we have a byte full ?
buffer[length - 1] = total;
total = 0;
counter = 0;
length--;
}
if (arr[i] == 1) { // bit is set
total += Math.pow(2, counter);
}
counter++;
}
buffer[0] = total;
console.log(buffer);
/* OUTPUT :
racar $ node test_node2.js
[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]
<Buffer 03 e8>
*/
var buf = new Buffer(4);
buf.writeUInt8(0x3, 0);
http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.6.0/api/buffers.html#buffer.writeUInt8
With more recent versions of Node this is much easier. Here's an example for a 2 byte unsigned integer:
let buf = Buffer.allocUnsafe(2);
buf.writeUInt16BE(1234); // Big endian
Or for a 4 byte signed integer:
let buf = Buffer.allocUnsafe(4); // Init buffer without writing all data to zeros
buf.writeInt32LE(-123456); // Little endian this time..
The different writeInt
functions were added in node v0.5.5.
Have a look at these docs for a better understanding:
Buffer
writeUInt16BE/LE
writeUIntBE/LE
allocUnsafe