I'm sure you will find this helpful: http://jsdo.it/tsmallfield/uint8array.

Click on javascript tab. There will appear the code to convert the Uint8Array in a string. The author shows 2 method:

• The first is about creating a view.
• The second offsetting bytes.

EDIT: report the code for completeness

var buffer = new ArrayBuffer( res.length ), // res is this.response in your case
    view   = new Uint8Array( buffer ),
    len    = view.length,
    fromCharCode = String.fromCharCode,
    i, s, str;    

/**
 *  1) 8bitの配列に入れて上位ビットけずる
 */
str = "";

for ( i = len; i--; ) {
  view[i] = res[i].charCodeAt(0);
}

for ( i = 0; i < len; ++i ) {
  str += fromCharCode( view[i] );
}    

/**
 *  2) & 0xff で上位ビットけずる
 */
str = "";

for ( i = 0; i < len; ++i ) {
  str += fromCharCode( res[i].charCodeAt(0) & 0xff );
}

The Buffer docs are very enlightening:

Prior to the introduction of TypedArray, the JavaScript language had no mechanism for reading or manipulating streams of binary data. The Buffer class was introduced as part of the Node.js API to enable interaction with octet streams in TCP streams, file system operations, and other contexts.

With TypedArray now available, the Buffer class implements the Uint8Array API in a manner that is more optimized and suitable for Node.js.

…

Buffer instances are also Uint8Array instances. However, there are subtle incompatibilities with TypedArray. For example, while ArrayBuffer#slice() creates a copy of the slice, the implementation of Buffer#slice() creates a view over the existing Buffer without copying, making Buffer#slice() far more efficient.

It is also possible to create new TypedArray instances from a Buffer with the following caveats:

1. The Buffer object's memory is copied to the TypedArray, not shared.

2. The Buffer object's memory is interpreted as an array of distinct elements, and not as a byte array of the target type. That is, new Uint32Array(Buffer.from([1, 2, 3, 4])) creates a 4-element Uint32Array with elements [1, 2, 3, 4], not a Uint32Array with a single element [0x1020304] or [0x4030201].

They go on to mention TypedArray.from, which in node accepts Buffers, so the 'correct' way is:

var arrByte = Uint8Array.from(data)

...however, this shouldn't be necessary at all since a Buffer is a Uint8Array and new UintArray(someBuffer) does work just fine.

There's also no context in your question, but Blob doesn't exist in node, and you shouldn't need it anyway, since Buffer already gives you raw access to binary data and the other fs methods let you read and write files.

Looks like I was going about this the wrong way. It made more sense to convert it into Uint8Array since what I'm sending in is an array of bytes.

I created the following function:

function byteToUint8Array(byteArray) {
    var uint8Array = new Uint8Array(byteArray.length);
    for(var i = 0; i < uint8Array.length; i++) {
        uint8Array[i] = byteArray[i];
    }

    return uint8Array;
}

This will convert an array of bytes (so byteArray is actually of type byte[]) into a Uint8Array.

Instances of Buffer are also instances of Uint8Array in node.js 4.x and higher. Thus, the most efficient solution is to access the buffer's own .buffer property directly, as per https://stackoverflow.com/a/31394257/1375574. The Buffer constructor also takes an ArrayBufferView argument if you need to go the other direction.

Note that this will not create a copy, which means that writes to any ArrayBufferView will write through to the original Buffer instance.

From Buffer to ArrayBuffer:

function toArrayBuffer(buffer) {
  const arrayBuffer = new ArrayBuffer(buffer.length);
  const view = new Uint8Array(arrayBuffer);
  for (let i = 0; i < buffer.length; ++i) {
    view[i] = buffer[i];
  }
  return arrayBuffer;
}

From ArrayBuffer to Buffer:

function toBuffer(arrayBuffer) {
  const buffer = Buffer.alloc(arrayBuffer.byteLength);
  const view = new Uint8Array(arrayBuffer);
  for (let i = 0; i < buffer.length; ++i) {
    buffer[i] = view[i];
  }
  return buffer;
}

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 could convert the bytes to a string list and then parse them back into binary bytes.

class ArrayBufferUtil {
  static toString(buffer) {
    return new Uint8Array(buffer).toString()
  }
  
  static parse(s) {
    return new Uint8Array(
      s.split(',').map(i => parseInt(i, 10))
    ).buffer
  }
}

Test

console.log( ArrayBufferUtil.toString( new ArrayBuffer(8) ))
console.log( ArrayBufferUtil.parse( '0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0' ))