TypeScript - convert string to bytes array

In this short article, we would like to show, how using TypeScript, convert string to bytes array.

Hint: below solution works under web browser and Node.js TypeScript.

Practical example

const toBytes = (text: string): number[] => {
  const surrogate = encodeURIComponent(text);
  const result = [];
  for (let i = 0; i < surrogate.length; ) {
    const character = surrogate[i];
    i += 1;
    if (character == '%') {
      const hex = surrogate.substring(i, (i += 2));
      if (hex) {
        result.push(parseInt(hex, 16));
      }
    } else {
      result.push(character.charCodeAt(0));
    }
  }
  return result;
};


// Usage example:

const bytes: number[] = toBytes('Some text here...'); // converts string to UTF-8 bytes

console.log(bytes);

Output:

[83, 111, 109, 101, 32, 116, 101, 120, 116, 32, 104, 101, 114, 101, 46, 46, 46]

See also

1. JavaScript - convert string to bytes array