How to store a byte array in Javascript

Question

I'm going to be storing a large array of byte values (most likely over a million) in Javascript. If I use a normal array with normal numbers, that will take 8 MB, because numbers are stored as IEEE doubles, but if I can store it as bytes, it will be only 1 MB.

I'd like to avoid wasting that much space for obvious reasons. Is there a way to store bytes as bytes instead of doubles? Browser compatibility isn't an issue for me, as long as it works in Chrome. This is in HTML5, if that makes a difference.

Answer 1

By using typed arrays, you can store arrays of these types:

• Int8
• Uint8
• Int16
• Uint16
• Int32
• Uint32
• Float32
• Float64

For example:

?var array = new Uint8Array(100);
array[42] = 10;
alert(array[42]);?

See it in action here.