Turns JavaScript strings into streams of UTF-8 encoded values (Uint8Array)
This package is NOT a published npm module
While writing sqldb, I came about this situation where I needed to store a column of type text in a table that must be of length 255 bytes. Since JavaScript strings may contain graphemes that are variable in length (ranging from 1 to 4 bytes in length), encoded as UTF-16 internally, I couldn't use the String.prototype.length property to check the length of string in bytes. The solution was to turn the string into a stream of bytes. Typically, an instance of Uint8Array.
Since sqldb is meant to run on server, there are APIs like Node's Buffer to help us. Also, we could use TextEncoder that does exactly what we need. It turns JS strings into Uint8Array array. Nice.
That looks like problem solved, and well, it is indeed. However, this problem made me curious about the working of Unicode. So I went on to read the Unicode spec, specifically the implementation details UTF-16 and UTF-8. This repo contains my implementation of turning JavaScript strings into Uint8Arrays.