Does Buffer have a compare method? - node.js

Question

I am reading NodeJS tutorial and I have reached to this page.
There is an example code for the compare method of Buffer objects:
var buffer1 = new Buffer('ABC');
var buffer2 = new Buffer('ABCD');
var result = buffer1.compare(buffer2);
if(result < 0) {
console.log(buffer1 +" comes before " + buffer2);
}else if(result == 0){
console.log(buffer1 +" is same as " + buffer2);
}else {
console.log(buffer1 +" comes after " + buffer2);
}
which throws this:
Executing the program.... $node main.js
/web/com/1460883529_55644/main.js:3 var result =
buffer1.compare(buffer2);
^ TypeError: Object ABC has no method 'compare' at Object. (/web/com/1460883529_55644/main.js:3:22)
at Module._compile (module.js:456:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:474:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:497:10)
at startup (node.js:119:16)
at node.js:929:3
It is strange that in the trace the object is called ABC and not buffer1 and that there is no compare method according to the trace. The example which tried to clarify the compare method confused me. Can someone explain what happened here?

Answer 1

That tutorial site uses Node v0.10 which is very old and does not even support the methods used in the tutorial itself!
The code works fine in the current release of Node, v4.4.3, as well as any other recent release. The relevant documentation for compare() is here: https://nodejs.org/api/buffer.html#buffer_buf_compare_otherbuffer
As an aside, you may want to stop using new Buffer() in favor of the more recent Buffer.from() API. This is said to improve code safety.