The way I see it, there are two ways we could offer support for binary data.
1. The nice thing about File-objects in js is, that they implement the Blob-interface, which can be converted to a binary string [0..255] by the Filereader api. This is what I do in util methods before handing data to the openpgp.js api. We could simply add an additional function to the public api that accepts the blobs instead of strings. This api function would basically invoke util methods with the Filereader Api and then just call the openpgp.js with the resulting string. This would make file handling a breeze with the openpgp.js since the Blob interface is used in all browser file-apis. The main drawback would be that openpgp.js would need support for the Blob and the Filereader api. These apis are common in browsers but not in other runtimes such as node.js. 2. We could add ArrayBuffer/Uint8Array support. Although these Apis arent in node.js either, these are more generic/ lower-level concepts that are a good fit for a library in my opinion. And I read somewhere that the node.js community is discussing also using the ArrayBuffer apis instead of their current Buffer api. We could add support by offering a new function in the public api that accepts an ArrayBuffer and invokes conversion to a string. But that could be slow and block the main thread for large files. So if the runtime supports them, we could use the BlobBuilder and FileReader Api which do conversion natively and asynchronously. Tankred
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