[OpenLayers-Users] Does OL have utility function to convert WKB into something usable?

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Tim Schaub wrote:
> Hey-
> 
> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does OL have utility function to convert WKB into something usable?
>> Searching with google did not show anything appropriate.
> 
> Reading binary files is problematic cross-browser.  In Firefox, we can 
> override the mime-type to "text/plain; charset=x-user-defined" and parse 
> a byte at a time, but this doesn't work in IE.
> 
> I'd be happy to be told otherwise, but I think the answer is use known 
> character sets with browsers (not binary files).

Tim and all who answered,

Thank you for your responses. It does not seem that any existing tool 
support this format. It is a binary encoded as a sequence of numbers and 
should not be too hard to to decode, but after a little more research it 
turns out that this is NOT more compact than just returning the numbers 
as I thought it might be. My goal was to find a more compact 
representation for a route polyline to decrease the bandwidth between 
the Ajax client and the server.

I'll probably revisit this later, but other tasks intrude at the moment.

Thanks and best regards,
   -Stephen Woodbridge