I have large Javascript objects which I would like to encode to base-64 for AWS Kinesis` It turns out that:
let objStr = new Buffer(JSON.stringify(obj), 'ascii');
new Buffer(objStr, 'base64').toString('ascii') !== objStr
I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible.
How can I base-64 encode JSON and safely decode it back to its original value?
You misunderstood the Buffer(str, [encoding]) constructor, the encoding tells the constructor what encoding was used to create str, or what encoding the constructor should use to decode str into a byte array.
Basically the Buffer class represents byte streams, it's only when you convert it from/to strings that encoding comes into context.
You should instead use buffer.toString("base64") to get base-64 encoded of the buffer content.
let objJsonStr = JSON.stringify(obj);
let objJsonB64 = Buffer.from(objJsonStr).toString("base64");