How to use the Buffer toString Function in Node

Buffers in Node are used to store arbitrary data, usually in the binary format.

In some situations, you'll need to be able to convert a buffer to a string, maybe to then be displayed to the user, or to be written to a file.

In this post, we'll learn how to convert a buffer to a string in Node.

How to convert a buffer to a string in Node

The easiest way to convert a buffer to a string is to use the toString() method.

Let's start off with an example buffer by building a buffer using the Buffer.from() method.

JAVASCRIPT
const buffer = Buffer.from("Hello World");

console.log(buffer);

BASH
<Buffer 48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 57 6f 72 6c 64>

As you can see, the buffer right now is not human readable just yet.

However, now that we have our buffer, we can then use the toString() method to convert it to a string.

JAVASCRIPT
const buffer = Buffer.from("Hello World");

const string = buffer.toString();

console.log(string);

BASH
Hello World

By default, the toString() method will convert the buffer to a string using the default encoding, however, you can specify the type of encoding that you want by passing it as an argument.

JAVASCRIPT
const buffer = Buffer.from("Hello World");

const string = buffer.toString("utf-8");

console.log(string);

BASH
Hello World

Other types of encodings include hex and base64.

For example, this is how this looks in hex:

JAVASCRIPT
const buffer = Buffer.from("Hello World");

const string = buffer.toString("hex");

console.log(string);

BASH
48656c6c6f20576f726c64

Here it is in base64:

JAVASCRIPT
const buffer = Buffer.from("Hello World");

const string = buffer.toString("base64");

console.log(string);

BASH
SGVsbG8gV29ybGQ=

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to convert a buffer to a string in Node.

You can just call toString() on a buffer and it will convert it to a string with the encoding that you specify.

Thanks for reading!

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