Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

fs: document intention and caveats of Buffer API #6020

Closed
wants to merge 2 commits into from
Closed
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
12 changes: 12 additions & 0 deletions doc/api/fs.markdown
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -94,6 +94,18 @@ Error: EISDIR, read
<etc.>
```

## Buffer API

`fs` functions support passing and receiving paths as both strings
and Buffers. The latter is intended to make it possible to work with
filesystems that allow for non-UTF-8 filenames. For most typical
uses, working with paths as Buffers will be unnecessary, as the string
API converts to and from UTF-8 automatically.

*Note* that on certain file systems (such as NTFS and HFS+) filenames
will always be encoded as UTF-8. On such file systems, passing
non-UTF-8 encoded Buffers to `fs` functions will not work as expected.

## Class: fs.FSWatcher

Objects returned from `fs.watch()` are of this type.
Expand Down