CodeProject: Binary Formats in JavaScript: Base64, Deflate, and UTF8.

CodeProject: Binary Formats in JavaScript: Base64, Deflate, and UTF8
This article demonstrates using binary formats in JavaScript.

This article demonstrates the using of binary formats in JavaScript code. JavaScript, by its nature, cannot operate with binary data represented as a fragment of memory – as a byte array. That makes it difficult to use community developed algorithms and encodings. A good example is the DEFLATE compressed format. This raises more problems if the JavaScript code has to be run on a web browser: data has to be delivered over HTTP.
In the proposed implementation, a byte array is emulated by a regular JavaScript array of objects. Also, the given implementation tries to solve the problem of binary data transfer to a client-side script. Let’s assume we have DEFLATE compressed data (.NET’s System.IO.Compression namespace, Java’s java.util.zip.*, PHP’s http_deflate) and there is a way to transfer it to the client in BASE64 format.