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Coding types

Strong typing

With strong typing, the receiving program can deserialize the message without a template or recipe how to do that. It also forms an extra check on the correctness, and correspondence between the expected fields and the received fields. Several approaches are possible: defining message types using separate messages, preceding each message with its structure, or preceding each field with its structure. The current version of DJUTILS-SERIALIZATION implements the last case: every field is preceded by a byte that indicates the type of the byte(s) that follow.

Endianness

When coding multi-byte values, knowing endianness is of the utmost importance. Endianness indicates whether the most-significant byte comes first or whether the least-significant byte comes first. The Internet and languages like Java use big endian, aka network byte order; the most significant byte comes first. Microsoft products and Intel processors internally use little endian; the least significant byte comes first. As an example, when we code an int (4 bytes) with the value 824, it is coded as follows using decimal notation (824 = 0 * 2563 + 0 * 2562 + 3 * 256 + 56 * 1):

|  0 |  0 |  3 | 56 | Byte ordering in Big endian
| 56 |  3 |  0 |  0 | Byte ordering in Little endian

Implemented types

The following types have been implemented in the v1-version of the standard:

code name description
0 BYTE_8 Byte, 8 bit signed two's complement integer
1 SHORT_16 Short, 16 bit signed two's complement integer
2 INT_32 Integer, 32 bit signed two's complement integer
3 LONG_64 Long, 64 bit signed two's complement integer
4 FLOAT_32 Float, single-precision 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point
5 DOUBLE_64 Float, double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point
6 BOOLEAN_8 Boolean, sent / received as a byte; 0 = false, 1 = true
7 CHAR_8 Char, 8-bit ASCII character
8 CHAR_16 Char, 16-bit Unicode character, the 2 bytes in the order of endianness
9 STRING_8 String, 32-bit number-preceded byte array of 8-bits characters
10 STRING_16 String, 32-bit number-preceded char array of 16-bits characters, the 2 bytes of each character in the order of the endianness
11 BYTE_8_ARRAY Byte array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of bytes
12 SHORT_16_ARRAY Short array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of shorts
13 INT_32_ARRAY Integer array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of integers
14 LONG_64_ARRAY Long array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of longs
15 FLOAT_32_ARRAY Float array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of floats
16 DOUBLE_64_ARRAY Double array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of doubles
17 BOOLEAN_8_ARRAY Boolean array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of booleans
18 BYTE_8_MATRIX Byte matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
19 SHORT_16_MATRIX Short matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
20 INT_32_MATRIX Integer matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
21 LONG_64_MATRIX Long matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
22 FLOAT_32_MATRIX Float matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
23 DOUBLE_64_MATRIX Double matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
24 BOOLEAN_8_MATRIX Boolean matrix, preceded by a 32-bit number row count and a 32-bit number column count
25 FLOAT_32_UNIT Float stored internally as a float in the corresponding SI unit, with unit type and display unit attached. The total size of the object is 7 bytes
26 DOUBLE_64_UNIT Double stored internally as a double in the corresponding SI unit, with unit type and display unit attached. The total size of the object is 11 bytes
27 FLOAT_32_UNIT_ARRAY Dense float array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of floats, with unit type and display unit attached to the entire float array
28 DOUBLE_64_UNIT_ARRAY Dense double array, preceded by a 32-bit number indicating the number of doubles, order, with unit type and display unit attached to the entire double array
29 FLOAT_32_UNIT_MATRIX Dense float matrix, preceded by a 32-bit row count int and a 32-bit column count int, with unit type and display unit attached to the entire float matrix
30 DOUBLE_64_UNIT_MATRIX Dense double matrix, preceded by a 32-bit row count int and a 32-bit column count int, with unit type and display unit attached to the entire double matrix
31 FLOAT_32_UNIT2_MATRIX Dense float matrix, preceded by a 32-bit row count int and a 32-bit column count int, with a unique unit type and display unit per row of the float matrix.
32 DOUBLE_64_UNIT2_MATRIX Dense double matrix, preceded by a 32-bit row count int and a 32-bit column count int, with a unique unit type and display unit per row of the double matrix.


Unicode characters

Unicode characters can be of different formats: UTF-8, UTF-16 with a byte-order marker (BOM), UTF-16BE (big-endian), UTF-16LE (little-endian), UTF-32 with a byte-order marker (BOM), UTF-32BE (big-endian), and UTF-32LE (little-endian). To code all Unicode characters in UTF-8, one to four UTF-8 bytes are needed through the use of escape characters. For UTF-16, one or two two-byte combinations are needed. In UTF-32, all Unicode characters can be directly coded. Because of the escape characters, characters and strings really look different in UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. The current version of DJUTILS-SERIALIZATION (and Sim0MQ) supports UTF-8, UTF-16BE (big-endian), and UTF-16LE (little-endian). Mode about the differences between the encodings is explained in the Unicode FAQ list: https://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#gen6.

For a discussion on little and big endianness for UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings, see the following discussion at StackExchange: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3833693/isn-t-on-big-endian-machines-utf-8s-byte-order-different-than-on-little-endian, as well as https://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf8-2.

Note

Note that because of escape characters (or surrogates), the String length is not equal to the number of bytes in UTF-8, nor to the number of bytes divided by two in UTF-16. The numbers in STRING_8, STRING_16, STRING_8_LE and STRING_16_LE are related to the number of bytes / shorts in the representation, and not to the number of characters in the resulting String.