How to decompress in node data that was compressed in ruby with gzip?

Question

We have a ruby instance that sends a message to a node instance via rabbitmq (bunny and amqplib) like below:

{ :type => data, :data => msg }.to_bson.to_s

This seems to be going pretty well, but msg's are sometimes long and we are sending them across data centers. zlib would help a lot.

doing smth like this in the ruby sender:

encoded_data = Zlib::Deflate.deflate(msg).force_encoding(msg.encoding)

and then reading it inside node:

data = zlib.inflateSync(encoded_data)

returns

"\x9C" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8

Is what I'm trying to do possible?

Answer 1

I am not a Ruby dev, so I will write the Ruby part in more or less pseudo code.

Ruby code (run online at https://repl.it/BoRD/0)

require 'json'
require 'zlib'

car = {:make => "bmw", :year => "2003"}

car_str = car.to_json

puts "car_str", car_str

car_byte = Zlib::Deflate.deflate(car_str)
# If you try to `puts car_byte`, it will crash with the following error:
# "\x9C" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8
#(repl):14:in `puts'
#(repl):14:in `puts'
#(repl):14:in `initialize'

car_str_dec = Zlib::Inflate.inflate(car_byte)

puts "car_str_dec", car_str_dec
# You can check that the decoded message is the same as the source.

# somehow send `car_byte`, the encoded bytes to RabbitMQ.

Node code

var zlib = require('zlib');

// somehow get the message from RabbitMQ.
var data = '...';

zlib.inflate(data, function (err, buffer) {
    if (err) {
        // Handle the error.
    } else {
       // If source didn't have any encoding,
       // no need to specify the encoding.
       console.log(buffer.toString());
    }
});

I also suggest you to stick with async functions in Node instead of their sync alternatives.