Encoding and representing binary data
When using cryptography, including hashes, signatures, and encrypted messages, we commonly have to deal with binary data. As every developer has experienced while working with binary data or files, they cannot easily be printed on screen or copied and pasted into other fields, so it's common to change their representation by encoding them into strings that only use human-readable characters.
Figure 2.1 – Looking at binary data on a terminal. Note how the terminal is trying to interpret every byte sequence as UTF-8 and frequently encounters invalid ones (replaced with the "
" symbol)
In Node.js, binary data is generally stored in Buffer objects and can be represented in multiple ways, including some encodings that are guaranteed to be human-readable. Throughout this book, we'll frequently use two ways of representing binary data: hex (short for "hexadecimal", which uses base16) and base64...
