title: node-superagent responseType('blob') vs. buffer(true)
body: <p>Due to the deprecation of <a href="https://github.com/request/request#deprecated" rel="nofollow noreferrer">request</a>, we're currently rewriting the request-service in our node app with superagent. So far all looks fine, however we're not quite sure how to request binary data/octet-stream and to process the actual response body as a <code>Buffer</code>. According to the <a href="https://visionmedia.github.io/superagent/#parsing-response-bodies" rel="nofollow noreferrer">docs</a> (on the client side) one should use </p>
  
  <pre><code>superAgentRequest.responseType('blob');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which seems to work fine on NodeJS, but I've also found this github <a href="https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent/issues/871#issuecomment-286199206" rel="nofollow noreferrer">issue</a> where they use</p>
  
  <pre><code>superAgentRequest.buffer(true);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which works just as well. So I'm wondering what the preferred method to request binary data in NodeJS is?</p>