Update 2016 - five years on there are now new methods in the specs (see support below) to convert between strings and typed arrays using proper encoding.

##TextEncoder

The TextEncoder represents:

The TextEncoder interface represents an encoder for a specific method, that is a specific character encoding, liarraybufferke utf-8, iso-8859-2, koi8, cp1261, gbk, ... An encoder takes a stream of code points as input and emits a stream of bytes.

Change note since the above was written: (ibid.)

Note: Firefox, Chrome and Opera used to have support for encoding types other than utf-8 (such as utf-16, iso-8859-2, koi8, cp1261, and gbk). As of Firefox 48 [...], Chrome 54 [...] and Opera 41, no other encoding types are available other than utf-8, in order to match the spec.*

*) Updated specs (W3) and here (whatwg).

After creating an instance of the TextEncoder it will take a string and encode it using a given encoding parameter:

if (!("TextEncoder" in window)) 
  alert("Sorry, this browser does not support TextEncoder...");

var enc = new TextEncoder(); // always utf-8
console.log(enc.encode("This is a a string to be converted to a Uint8Array"));

You then of course use the .buffer parameter on the resulting Uint8Array to convert the underlaying ArrayBuffer to a different view if needed.

Just make sure that the characters in the string adhere to the encoding schema, for example, if you use characters outside the UTF-8 range in the example they will be encoded to two bytes instead of one.

For general use you would use UTF-16 encoding for things like localStorage.

##TextDecoder

Likewise, the opposite process uses the TextDecoder:

The TextDecoder interface represents a decoder for a specific method, that is a specific character encoding, like utf-8, iso-8859-2, koi8, cp1261, gbk, ... A decoder takes a stream of bytes as input and emits a stream of code points.

All available decoding types can be found here.

if (!("TextDecoder" in window))
  alert("Sorry, this browser does not support TextDecoder...");

var enc = new TextDecoder("utf-8");
var arr = new Uint8Array([84,104,105,115,32,105,115,32,97,32,85,105,110,116,
                          56,65,114,114,97,121,32,99,111,110,118,101,114,116,
                          101,100,32,116,111,32,97,32,115,116,114,105,110,103]);
console.log(enc.decode(arr));

##The MDN StringView library

An alternative to these is to use the StringView library (licensed as lgpl-3.0) which goal is:

• to create a C-like interface for strings (i.e., an array of character codes — an ArrayBufferView in JavaScript) based upon the JavaScript ArrayBuffer interface
• to create a highly extensible library that anyone can extend by adding methods to the object StringView.prototype
• to create a collection of methods for such string-like objects (since now: stringViews) which work strictly on arrays of numbers rather than on creating new immutable JavaScript strings
• to work with Unicode encodings other than JavaScript's default UTF-16 DOMStrings

giving much more flexibility. However, it would require us to link to or embed this library while TextEncoder/TextDecoder is being built-in in modern browsers.

#Support

As of July/2018:

TextEncoder (Experimental, On Standard Track)

 Chrome    | Edge      | Firefox   | IE        | Opera     | Safari
 ----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------
     38    |     ?     |    19°    |     -     |     25    |     -

 Chrome/A  | Edge/mob  | Firefox/A | Opera/A   |Safari/iOS | Webview/A
 ----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------
     38    |     ?     |    19°    |     ?     |     -     |     38

°) 18: Firefox 18 implemented an earlier and slightly different version
of the specification.

WEB WORKER SUPPORT:

Experimental, On Standard Track

 Chrome    | Edge      | Firefox   | IE        | Opera     | Safari
 ----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------
     38    |     ?     |     20    |     -     |     25    |     -

 Chrome/A  | Edge/mob  | Firefox/A | Opera/A   |Safari/iOS | Webview/A
 ----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------
     38    |     ?     |     20    |     ?     |     -     |     38

Data from MDN - `npm i -g mdncomp` by epistemex

You can do:

var buf = Buffer.from(bufStr, 'utf8');

But this is a bit silly, so another suggestion would be to copy the minimal amount of code out of the called function to allow yourself access to the original buffer. This might be quite easy or fairly difficult depending on the details of that library.

Have you tried the TextEncoder/TextDecoder APIs? I've used them for converting strings in both nodejs and the browser and haven't seen any differences.

E.g.:

const encoder = new TextEncoder('utf-8');
const decoder = new TextDecoder('utf-8');

const foo = 'Hello world!';
const encoded = encoder.encode(foo);
console.log(encoded);

const decoded = decoder.decode(encoded);
console.log(decoded);