A bit baffled by this one. I'm using a pretty typical Node+Express setup, and many of my scripts are manipulating Buffer objects, which work fine basically everywhere. Except in one script, which defines a route for retrieving a document from an ElasticSearch data store. I'm trying to create a new Buffer object by decoding a base64-encoded string of the file data, and then send that to the browser. But even though a console.log immediately before the call to new Buffer(fildata,'base64') prints out a description of the Buffer function just as you'd expect it to, I get an exception TypeError: Buffer is not a function.

The relevant code:

var Buffer = require('buffer');

// ... then in the route, inside the callback from the ElasticSearch get() method:

res.setHeader('Content-Type', doc[mimetype]);

res.setHeader('Content-disposition', 'attachment; filename=' + doc[filename]);

res.type(doc[mimetype]);

console.log(Buffer); // Yep, definitely a function here!

res.send(new Buffer(doc[filedata], 'base64'));

And the output from node (note the console.log output just before the exception is thrown):

{ Buffer:

   { [Function: Buffer]

     poolSize: 8192,

     isBuffer: [Function: isBuffer],

     compare: [Function: compare],

     isEncoding: [Function],

     concat: [Function],

     byteLength: [Function: byteLength] },

  SlowBuffer: [Function: SlowBuffer],

  INSPECT_MAX_BYTES: 50,

  kMaxLength: 2147483647 }

/Users/myusername/mynodeproject/routes/retrieve.js:50

                    res.send(new Buffer(doc[filedata], 'base64'));

                             ^



TypeError: Buffer is not a function

    at /Users/myusername/mynodeproject/routes/retrieve.js:50:15

    at respond (/Users/myusername/mynodeproject/node_modules/elasticsearch/src/lib/transport.js:301:9)

    at checkRespForFailure (/Users/myusername/mynodeproject/node_modules/elasticsearch/src/lib/transport.js:239:7)

    at HttpConnector.<anonymous> (/Users/myusername/mynodeproject/node_modules/elasticsearch/src/lib/connectors/http.js:155:7)

    at IncomingMessage.wrapper (/Users/myusername/mynodeproject/node_modules/lodash/index.js:3095:19)

    at emitNone (events.js:72:20)

    at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:166:7)

    at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:905:12)

    at doNTCallback2 (node.js:452:9)

    at process._tickCallback (node.js:366:17)