Reading bytes from a JavaScript string

Question

I have a string containing binary data in JavaScript. Now I want to read, for example, an integer from it. So I get the first 4 characters, use charCodeAt, do s

Answer 1

How did you get the binary data into the string in the first place? How the binary data gets encoded into a string is an IMPORTANT consideration, and you need an answer to that question before you can proceed.

One way I know of to get binary data into a string, is to use the XHR object, and set it to expect UTF-16.

Once it's in utf-16, you can retrieve 16-bit numbers from the string using "....".charCodeAt(0)

which will be a number between 0 and 65535

Then, if you like, you can convert that number into two numbers between 0 and 255 like this:

var leftByte = mynumber>>>8;
var rightByte = mynumber&255;