@stacks/common

What is @stacks/common?

@stacks/common is a utility library that provides a set of common functions and utilities used across the Stacks ecosystem. It includes functions for data manipulation, encoding/decoding, and other helper utilities that facilitate development within the Stacks blockchain environment.

What are @stacks/common's main functionalities?

Data Encoding/Decoding

This feature provides utilities for encoding and decoding data, such as converting strings to byte arrays and vice versa. This is useful for handling data in a format suitable for blockchain transactions.

const { utf8ToBytes, bytesToUtf8 } = require('@stacks/common');

const text = 'Hello, Stacks!';
const bytes = utf8ToBytes(text);
console.log(bytes); // Uint8Array of byte values

const decodedText = bytesToUtf8(bytes);
console.log(decodedText); // 'Hello, Stacks!'

Hex Encoding/Decoding

This feature allows for conversion between hexadecimal strings and byte arrays, which is essential for handling cryptographic data and transaction payloads in blockchain applications.

const { hexToBytes, bytesToHex } = require('@stacks/common');

const hexString = '48656c6c6f';
const bytes = hexToBytes(hexString);
console.log(bytes); // Uint8Array of byte values

const hex = bytesToHex(bytes);
console.log(hex); // '48656c6c6f'

Buffer Utilities

This feature provides utilities for working with buffers, such as concatenating multiple byte arrays. This is useful for constructing data payloads that need to be sent over the network or stored on the blockchain.

const { concatBytes } = require('@stacks/common');

const buffer1 = new Uint8Array([1, 2, 3]);
const buffer2 = new Uint8Array([4, 5, 6]);
const combined = concatBytes(buffer1, buffer2);
console.log(combined); // Uint8Array [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Other packages similar to @stacks/common

buffer

The 'buffer' package is a Node.js core module that provides a way of handling binary data. It offers similar functionalities for encoding/decoding and manipulating byte arrays. While 'buffer' is more general-purpose and widely used across various Node.js applications, @stacks/common is tailored specifically for the Stacks blockchain ecosystem.

crypto-js

The 'crypto-js' package provides a variety of cryptographic algorithms for JavaScript. It includes utilities for encoding/decoding and hashing, similar to some of the functionalities in @stacks/common. However, 'crypto-js' is more focused on cryptographic operations, whereas @stacks/common includes additional utilities specific to blockchain data handling.

README

@stacks/common

Common utilities used by Stacks.js packages.

Installation

npm install @stacks/common