[erlang-questions] Writing platform independent Socket based binary parsing code

[Dmitry Kolesnikov]

Hello,

I'd like to quote one statement here: "Network stacks and communication protocols must also define their endianness. Otherwise, two nodes of different endianness would be unable to communicate."
As an example, TCP/IP protocol suite is defined to be a big-endian. 

So, the parsing of protocol primitive shall not be dependent on CPU architecture. E.g. If you protocol say that version is serialized into big-endian then your parsing code shall be same and it is platform independent. 

- Dmitry

P.S: ;-)  http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2011/09/simply-explained-1.html


On May 12, 2012, at 10:34 AM, Arun Muralidharan wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I have an erlang application which includes parsing of binary data from socket (both TCP and UDP). The binary data is as per some specific protocol, so my options for TCP and UDP sock is as per below:
> 
> 
> TCP sock :
> Opts = [binary, {packet, 0}, {reuseaddr, true},
>             {keepalive, true}, {backlog, 30}, {active, false}],
> UDP sock :
> [binary,{active,once},{recbuf,2097152}]
> 
> Now, when i parse the data I get from socket, I do like this (On UNIX):
> 
>     << Version:4/big-unsigned-integer-unit:8,
>        Length:2/big-unsigned-integer:8,
>        _Rest/binary >> = Bin_event_From_Socket.
> 
> Now, this would give me a problem when run on LINUX as LINUX is little endian based. So, the option here for me is to convert 'big' to 'little' in the above code.
> 
> But, Erlang being a VM based language, I must be having some facility to write platform independent code. I searched the NEt but couldnt find much on it.
> 
> So, the question here is how can i write a platform independent sockaet data parsing code ?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Arun
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20120512/a5b47692/attachment.htm>