I&#x27;ve never done it with JS. It&#x27;s not really a problem in C, though. If there&#x27;s a lot of data, you&#x27;re no better off with text; if there&#x27;s not much, reading binary data isn&#x27;t too bad. You&#x27;ve usually got other problems on top of decoding the actual data - like, why is this data coming in the first place? Why isn&#x27;t the code accepting it properly? Why isn&#x27;t the other end listening? The data encoding is just the tip of the iceberg.<p>Either way, the advantages of binary often outweigh the difficulty of having a human read the data. As the saying goes, code is executed far more often than it&#x27;s read.<p>(Most binary formats have some fairly obvious possible text representations, at least for key fields (they&#x27;re just encoding ints, floats, strings, bitfields, etc.). When you&#x27;re having difficulty, or you&#x27;re simply curious, you can print them out. If the format is any good, malformed messages are easy to check for in code - this code is not harder to debug than any other. If anything it&#x27;s actually easier than with some kind of text format.)