Compresing / decompresing a binary string into/from hex in javascript not working

Question

Introduction

I'm currently working on John Conway's Game of Life in js. I have the game working (view here) and i'm working on extra functionalities such as sharing your "grid / game" to your friends. To do this i'm extracting the value's of the grid (if the cell is alive or dead) into a long string of 0's and 1's.

This long string can be seen as binary code and im trying to "compress" it into a hexadecimal string by chopping the binary up into substrings with a lenght of 8 and then determining its hexadecimal value. decompressing works the other way around. Deviding the hex string into bits of two and determining its binary value.

parseInt('00011110', 2).toString(16); // returns '1e'
parseInt('1e', 16).toString(2); // returns '11110'
// Technically both representations still have the same decimal value

As shown above js will cut off the leading 0s since they're 'not needed'. I've fixed this problem by looking if the lenght of the binary string returned by the function is 8, ifnot it adds enough 0s in front untill its length is exactly 8.

It could be that this function is not working correctly but i'm not sure.

It seems to work with small binary values.

please note you can only put in strings with a length devidable by 8

The problem

Longer binary strings don't seem to work (shown below) and this is probably not caused by overflow (that would probably result in a long row of 0s at the end).

EDIT:

var a = "1000011101110101100011000000001011111100111011010011110000000100101000000111111010111111110101100001100101110001100110110101000111110001001010110111001010100011010010111001110010111001101100000100001001101000001010101110001001001110101001110001001111010110011000010100001111000111000011000101010110010011101100000100011101101110110000100101000110011101101011011111010111001001000101000001001111010010010010100000110101101101110101110101010101111101100110101110100100110000010000000110000100000001110001011001011011000101111110101000100011010100011001000101111001000010001011001011100100110001101100001111110110000000111010100101110110101110110111001100000001001100111110000111001010111110110100010111001011101110011011100100111010001100010111100111011010111110111101010000111101010100011000000111000010101011101101011110010011001110000111100000111011111011000000100000010100001111110101001110001100011001"  

a.length  
904  

var c = compress(a)  

c  
 "87758c2fced3c4a07ebfd619719b51f12b72a34b9cb9b042682ae24ea713d66143c7c5593b0476ec2519dadf5c91413d24ad6dd7557d9ae93040611c596c5fa88d4645e422cb931b0fd80ea5daedcc04cf872bed172ee6e4e8c5e76bef5f546070abb5e4ce1eefb25fd4e319"  

var d = decompress(c)

d
"100001110111010110001100001011111100111011010011110001001010000001111110101111111101011000011001011100011001101101010001111100010010101101110010101000110100101110011100101110011011000001000010011010000010101011100010010011101010011100010011110101100110000101000011110001111100010101011001001110110000010001110110111011000010010100011001110110101101111101011100100100010100000100111101001001001010110101101101110101110101010101111101100110101110100100110000010000000110000100011100010110010110110001011111101010001000110101000110010001011110010000100010110010111001001100011011000011111101100000001110101001011101101011101101110011000000010011001111100001110010101111101101000101110010111011100110111001001110100011000101111001110110101111101111010111110101010001100000011100001010101110110101111001001100111000011110111011111011001001011111110101001110001100011001"  

d == a  
false

end of edit

My code

The function I use to compress:

function compress(bin) {
  bin = bin.toString(); // To make sure the binary is a string;
  var returnValue = ''; // Empty string to add our data to later on.

  for (var i = 0; i < parseInt(bin.length / 8); i++) {
    // Determining the substring.
    var substring = bin.substr(i*8, 8)
    // Determining the hexValue of this binary substring.
    var hexValue = parseInt(substring, 2).toString(16);
    // Adding this hexValue to the end string which we will return.
    returnValue += hexValue;
  }

  // Returning the to hex compressed string.
  return returnValue;
}

The function I use to decompress:

function decompress(compressed) {
  var returnValue = ''; // Empty string to add our data to later on.

  for (var i = 0; i < parseInt(compressed.length / 2); i++) {
    // Determining the substring.
    var substring = compressed.substr(i*2, 2);
    // Determining the binValue of this hex substring.
    var binValue = parseInt(substring, 16).toString(2);

    // If the length of the binary value is not equal to 8 we add leading 0s (js deletes the leading 0s)
    // For instance the binary number 00011110 is equal to the hex number 1e,
    // but simply running the code above will return 11110. So we have to add the leading 0s back.
    if (binValue.length != 8) {
      // Determining how many 0s to add:
      var diffrence = 8 - binValue.length;

      // Adding the 0s:
      for (var j = 0; j < diffrence; j++) {
        binValue = '0'+binValue;
      }
    }

    // Adding the binValue to the end string which we will return.
    returnValue += binValue
    }
    // Returning the decompressed string.
    return returnValue;
}

Does anyone know what's going wrong? Or how to do this properly?

Answer 1

Problem is you are expecting your compress function to always add pairs of 2 hexa letters, but that is not always the case. For example '00000011' gives just a '3', but you actually want '03'. So you need to cover those cases in your compress function:

var hexValue = parseInt(substring, 2).toString(16);
if(hexValue.length == 1) hexValue = '0'+hexValue