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

Yes, there's a simple way without manually writing a loop (the loop still exists somewhere in background):

new Uint16Array([1,2,3]);

That's all. Of course, floating numbers will be rounded down and big numbers will overflow.

Converting typed array to buffer

The buffer of any typed array is accessible through .buffer property, as anyone can read on MDN:

new Uint16Array([1,2,3]).buffer;

Chosing the right typed array

Be warned that mentioned Uint16Array will only hold integers (no floating point) between zero and 65535. To hold any javascript Number¹ you will want to use Float64Array - the bigest one, taking 8 bytes total.

1: Which is unrestricted double, which appears to be 64bit IEEE 754 number

Here's a map I have created that maps some of the important information related to number data types:

var NUMBER_TYPE = [
  {name: "uint8",   bytes:1, max:        255,       min: 0,                floating: false, array: Uint8Array},
  {name: "int8",    bytes:1, max:        127,       min: -128,             floating: false, array: Int8Array},
  {name: "uint16",  bytes:2, max:      65535,       min: 0,                floating: false, array: Uint16Array},
  {name: "int16",   bytes:2, max:      32767,       min: -32768,           floating: false, array: Int16Array},
  {name: "uint32",  bytes:4, max: 4294967295,       min: 0,                floating: false, array: Uint32Array},
  {name: "int32",   bytes:4, max: 2147483647,       min: -2147483648,      floating: false, array: Int32Array},
  {name: "float64", bytes:8, max: Number.MAX_VALUE, min: Number.MIN_VALUE, floating: true , array: Float64Array}
];

Float 32 is missing as I was unable to calculate necessary information for it. The map, as it is, can be used to calculate the smallest typed array you can fit a Number in:

function findNumberType(num) {
    // detect whether number has something after the floating point
    var float = num!==(num|0);
    // Prepare the return variable
    var type = null;
    for(var i=0,l=NUMBER_TYPE.length; i<l; i++) {
      // Assume this type by default - unless break is hit, every type ends as `float64`
      type = NUMBER_TYPE[i];
      // Comparison asserts that number is in bounds and disalows floats to be stored 
      // as integers
      if( (!float || type.floating) && num<=type.max && num>=type.min) {
          // If this breaks, the smallest data type has been chosen
          break;
      }
    }
    return type;
}

Used as:

var n = 1222;
var buffer = new (findNumberType(n).array)([n]);

Note that this only works if NUMBER_TYPE is properly ordered.

A buffer's first argument must be a: String, Buffer, ArrayBuffer, Array, or array-like object.

Taking that information into account, we could implement what you are looking for by creating a buffer from a String. It would look something like the following:

let json = [ 5, false, 55, 'asdf' ];

let buffer = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(json));
console.log('Buffer: ', buffer); // Buffer: <Buffer 5b 20 35 2c 20 66 61 6c 73 65 2c 20 35 35 2c 20 22 61 73 64 66 22 20 5d>

Then you can bring your JSON back like so:

let converted = JSON.parse(buffer);
console.log('Parsed to json', converted); // Parsed to json [ 5, false, 55, 'asdf' ]