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javascriptbinaryasciihexnon-printable

Detect non-printable characters in JavaScript

Is it possible to detect binary data in JavaScript?

I'd like to be able to detect binary data and convert it to hex for easier readability/debugging.

After more investigation I've realized that detecting binary data is not the right question, because binary data can contain regular characters, and non-printable characters.

Outis's question and answer (/[\x00-\x1F]/) is really the best we can do in an attempt to detect binary characters.

Note: You must remove line feeds and possibly other characters from your ascii string sequence for the check to actually work.

Solution

  • If by "binary", you mean "contains non-printable characters", try:

    /[\x00-\x1F]/.test(data)

    If whitespace is considered non-binary data, try:

    /[\x00-\x08\x0E-\x1F]/.test(data)

    If you know the string is either ASCII or binary, use:

    /[\x00-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/.test(data)

    or:

    /[\x00-\x08\x0E-\x1F\x80-\xFF]/.test(data)