TCP/IP communication from the unix server to the Pure Data - unix

Question

I am interested in TCP/IP communication from the Unix server to the Pure Data. I have it realized using sockets on the Unix server side, and netclient on the Pure Data side. I exploited the chat-server tutorial for this (3.Networking > 10.chat_client.pd).
Now the problem lies that the server is streaming the data out as a "string" message delimited with ";"
My question is, is there a way to send something other than string message to Pure Data, like byte-stream or serialized number stream? Can Pure Data receive such messages?
Since string takes too many bytes to transfer, for example number "1024;" is already 5 bytes, while such an integer number is just 4 bytes.
UPDATE: For everyone that stumbles upon this post in search for the answer.
Apparently [netclient] on the Pure Data side cannot receive nothing else than ; delimited messages.
So the solution for the problem posed above:
My question is, is there a way to send something other than string message to Pure Data, like byte-stream or serialized number stream? Can Pure Data receive such messages?
The solution is to use [tcpclient], it can receive byte-stream data.
Now my question is, how do I get four compact numbers to work with?
Now I have a series of bytes, at least in the correct order.
From my UNIX server I am sending a structure
typedef struct {
int var_code;
int sample_time;
int hr;
float hs;
} phy_data;
Sample data might be 2 1000000 51 2000.56
When received and printed in Pure Data I get output like this:
: 0 0 0 2 0 10 114 26 0 0 0 51 0 16 242 78
You can notice number 2 and number 51 clearly, I guess the others are correct as well.
How can I get these numbers back to a usable format?
Maybe some manipulation with [bytes2any] and [route], but I haven't been able to extract the data with it?

Answer 1

here's an outline of what you have to do:
repackage the bytelist to small messages of the correct size for the various types.
since all your elements are 4 byte long, you simply repackage your list (or bytestream, as TCP/IP doesn't guarantee to deliver your 16 bytes as a single list, but could also decide to break it into a list of arbitrary length) to a number of 4 atom lists.
the most stable way, would probably be to 1st serialize the list (check the "serializer" example in the [list] help) and than reassamble that list to 4 elements.
if you can use externals like zexy you could use [repack 4] for that.
if you trust [netclient] to output your messages as complete lists, you could simply use a large [unpack ....] and 4 [pack]s
interpret the raw data for each sublist
integers is rather simple, floats are way more complicated
integers:
|
[unpack 0 0 0 0]
| | | |
[<< 8] | | |
| | | |
[+ ] | |
| | |
[<< 8] | |
| | |
[+ ] |
| |
[<< 8] |
| |
[+ ]
|
floats are left as an exercise to the user :-)

Answer 2

the real solution to your problem would be to use a well-defined application-layer protocol, rather than brew your own.
the most widespread protocol in use for applications like Pd, is certainly OSC.
in order to decode the raw OSC-bytes into Pd-messages, use [unpackOSC] (part of the "mrpeach" library; on Debian, you install it via the pd-osc package)
on the "server" side, you can use liblo for encoding data and sending it.
note
be aware that since OSC is packet-based, you will need a packetizing mechanism for stream-based protocols like TCP/IP. as with OSC-1.2, this should be SLIP. liblo should already take care of this. check the patches accompanying [unpackOSC] for how to do this within Pd.
all this is not needed if you are using a UDP as a transport.