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Handling Binary Data in Foxx: ArangoDB Tutorial

October 15, 2014/,

Handling binary data in JavaScript applications is a bit tricky because JavaScript does not provide a data type for binary data. This post explains how to use binary data in JavaScript actions written using ArangoDB’s Foxx.

String vs. binary data

Internally, JavaScript strings are sequences of 16 bit integer values. Furthermore, the ECMAScript standard requires that a JavaScript implementation should interpret characters in conformance with the Unicode standard, using either UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding.

While this is fine for handling natural language, it becomes problematic when trying to work with arbitrary binary data. Binary data cannot be used safely in a JavaScript string because it may not be valid UTF-16 data.

Read more on Jan’s Blog

If you want to continue with other JavaScript related resources, you should start with ArangoDB NoSQL and JavaScript.

Jan Steemann

Jan Steemann

After more than 30 years of playing around with 8 bit computers, assembler and scripting languages, Jan decided to move on to work in database engineering. Jan is now a senior C/C++ developer with the ArangoDB core team, being there from version 0.1. He is mostly working on performance optimization, storage engines and the querying functionality. He also wrote most of AQL (ArangoDB’s query language).
October 15, 2014,Jan Steemann

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