Newbie: how do I do a simple byte serialization of a string schema?

[alshdavid]

Hi, sorry for the super basic question but I am struggling getting off the ground despite the examples and documentation 🙏

I am implementing a simple IPC layer between a Rust host process and a Node.js child process and am trying to get up and running with a ping/pong request/response between the processes.

To get started I tried out Arrow using the JavaScript avsc npm package, which works

const type = avsc.Type.forSchema('string')

const bytes = new Uint8Array(type.toBuffer("o w"))
console.log(bytes) // [ 6, 111, 32, 119 ]
console.log(new TextDecoder().decode(bytes)) // "o w"

const val = type.fromBuffer(Buffer.from([ 6, 111, 32, 119 ])) 
console.log(val) // "o w"

I'm a bit confused trying to replicate this in Rust

let mut s = StringArray::from_iter_values(&["o w"]);
println!("{:?}", s.values()); // sort of similar but not quite

let msg: Vec<u8> = s.to_bytes(); // I want to do something like this
send_to_nodejs(msg); // So I can send the data to Nodejs

Any help would be appreciated!

[tustvold]

I am not very familiar with the Javascript API so I am not entirely sure what you are wanting to achieve, but in arrow arrays are lists of potentially multiple elements.

If you want to obtain a single element from a StringArray you would use array.value(idx) where idx is the index of the element you want to retrieve the value for. Alternatively you can iterate over the values in an array using array.iter()