How to use strings with JavaScript Typed Arrays

You can use TextEncoder and TextDecoder, it was originally only implemented in Firefox, but has since gained wider support. This two full years after your initial question :)

Fortunately, there exists a polyfill that does the job.

var initialString = "Something or other";

var utf8EncodedString = new TextEncoder("utf-8").encode(initialString);

// utf8EncodedString is a Uint8Array, so you can inspect
// the individual bytes directly:
for (var i = 0; i < utf8EncodedString.length; ++i) {
    console.log(utf8EncodedString[i]);
}

var decodedString = new TextDecoder("utf-8").decode(utf8EncodedString);

if (initialString !== decodedString) {
    console.error("You're lying!");
}

This should solve your problem

How to use strings with JavaScript Typed Arrays

JS Strings are stored in UTF-16 encoding where each character takes 2 bytes. String.charCodeAt returns these 2-byte Unicodes. This is how to read UTF-16 encoded strings from a DataView:

DataView.prototype.getUTF16String = function(offset, length) {
    var utf16 = new ArrayBuffer(length * 2);
    var utf16View = new Uint16Array(utf16);
    for (var i = 0; i < length; ++i) {
        utf16View[i] = this.getUint8(offset + i);
    }
    return String.fromCharCode.apply(null, utf16View);
};

and these functions to convert string to and from arraybuffer

    function ab2str(buf) {
       return String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint16Array(buf));
     }

    function str2ab(str) {
       var buf = new ArrayBuffer(str.length*2); // 2 bytes for each char
       var bufView = new Uint16Array(buf);
       for (var i=0, strLen=str.length; i<strLen; i++) {
         bufView[i] = str.charCodeAt(i);
       }
       return buf;
     }

If you are willing to use external libraries, you can take a look at jDataView which supports reading strings in different encodings from a TypedArray and handles endianness conversion as well.