Create way to store ArrayBuffer without converting to JSON

[jviereck]

In my usecase, I want to store ArrayBuffers using localForage. At the moment localForage converts the input to a string using JSON.stringify when using the WebSQL and localStorage backends. For binary data, I think it is more reasonable to convert the input array to base64 string and then store it in the WebSQL/localStorage data base.

How does the idea to store the data in base64 encoding sound to you? Would you accept a PR that implements this feature?

PS: Issues that might be related to this: #28

[fwenzel]

This might actually be the same as #28 indeed. I do agree base64 makes more sense than stringify for these. Now, base64 inflates size by 1/3, so potentially a different encoding is better, but either way, it'd be a good start at storing blobs.

[jviereck]

Now, base64 inflates size by 1/3, so potentially a different encoding is better, but either way, it'd be a good start at storing blobs

Good point. Is there a technical problem that prevents us from concatinating the String.fromCharCode(x) result of every single byte:

// Just JS-Pseudocode
stringToStore = arrayBuffer.map(function(c) { return String.fromCharCode(c); }).join('');

[tofumatt]

Off the top of my head, I’d think speed. But that’s just a guess.

[tofumatt]

I'm okay with base64 encodes for localStorage... I would thing WebSQL would accept Blob types and maybe I'm just being lazy about converting blobs, so I'll check that out now.

[jviereck]

Personally I am not interested in support Blob, but only ArrayBuffers. If we can get Blob support easy as well, that's great :)

From my research blobs can be stored in websql, but ArrayBuffers can not. There is a way to create blobs from ArrayBuffers, so we could store the arraybuffer as Blob in the websql database. When we call the `getItem(...) method, how could we figure out the stored Blob is supposed to be converted into an Arraybuffer? Store additional meta data in a different websql table could solve this issue.

Matthew Riley MacPherson notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm okay with base64 encodes for localStorage... I would thing WebSQL
would accept Blob types and maybe I'm just being lazy about converting
blobs, so I'll check that out now.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#40 (comment)

Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.