vs node Buffer

[timoxley]

There's some similar projects to this that implement node's Buffer api. This means reasonably transparent interoperability with node and one less api to maintain.

This is the one browserify uses afaik https://github.com/feross/buffer

[MidnightLightning]

Thanks for your comments; yes it appears to be similar to Browserify's implementation, but the intent is different for this module. This module's use in the rest of the cryptocoinjs ecosystem is to standardize the input conversions to various functions (such that a function can just call input = binString(input) and know that input is now a Buffer) without each implementation having to do the if (Array.isArray(input)) ... else if (Buffer.isBuffer(input)) ... logic tree every time.

Beyond that simple use-case with all defaults, the ability to convert between types if you want is useful, and I agree if you're familiar with Buffers there's other ways to do those conversions directly, but this allows for consistency among the project (i.e. even though Buffers do allow ascii as an input format type, that format isn't exposed here, to encourage utf8 instead).

True most of the conversions between different types just use the Node Buffer API, but the one exception of getting an array of byte values out (rather than a Buffer) is valuable since native Node Buffers don't have the join, filter, or map functions Arrays do, so some implementations prefer Arrays, and there's no easy output filter for Buffers to become an Array. Also, the ability to automatically duck-type a string that starts with 0x as a hex-encoded string was very useful for sanitizing certain inputs.

[jprichardson]

I think binstring can be deprecated. Further discussion here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bitcoinhackers/4xkUBnGgQB8/discussion

@sidazhang thoughts?

[shesek]

I also think that the cryptocoinjs modules should standardize on using Buffer as the uniform input/output format, and have developers do conversions in app-land if needed. I believe that string support must go away (it is too ambiguous, especially with the special 0x prefix handling), but feel less strongly about removing support for byte arrays and Uint8Array (I don't feel its needed and its somewhat cumbersome to handle conversions everywhere, but its ok-ish).

However, I think that binstring might be useful for higher-level code in application land, where it might make more sense to support multiple input formats, as well as a utility for dealing with user-provided input. Though... even for that, I feel that a toBuffer utility that takes multiple input formats and always returns a Buffer might make more sense.

no easy output filter for Buffers to become an Array

Array.apply(null, buff)

[dcousens]

Deprecated in favour of Buffer?
I got asked this recently, so just cleaning up

[jprichardson]

Deprecated in favour of Buffer?

Yep, we can safely deprecate this I'd say.

[dcousens]

@jprichardson added notice in ac0f4e0

[dcousens]

Could use a npm deprecate notice though