Serialization of struct

Question

Suppose i have a struct whose member values i want to send over the network to another system using winsock 2. I\'m using C++ language. How do i convert it to char * keepin

Answer 1

You can just do

struct MyStruct {

    int data;
    char* someNullTerminatedName; // Assuming not larger than 1023 chars

    std::ostream& serialize(std::ostream& os) const {
        char null = '\0';
        os.write((char*)&data, sizeof(data));
        os.write(someNullTerminatedName, strlen(someNullTerminatedName));
        os.write(&null, 1);
        return os;
    }
    std::istream& deserialize(std::istream& is) {
        char buffer[1024];
        int i = 0;
        is.read((char*)&data, sizeof(data));
        do { buffer[i] = is.get(); ++i; } while(buffer[i] != '\0');
        if (someNullTerminatedName != NULL) free(someNullTerminatedName);
        someNullTerminatedName = (char*)malloc(i);
        for (i = 0; buffer[i] != '\0'; ++i) {
            someNullTerminatedName[i] = buffer[i];
        }
        return is;
    }
};

It's up to you to take care of endianness and differences in size of ints and whatnot.

Example:

MyStruct foo, bar;
std::stringstream stream;
foo.serialize(stream);
// ... Now stream.str().c_str() contains a char* buffer representation of foo.
// For example it might contain [ 1f 3a 4d 10 h e l l o w o r l d \0 ]
bar.deserialize(stream);
// ... Now bar is a copy, via a serial stream of data, of foo.

If you have a socket library that exposes its interface via C++ iostreams then you don't even need the stringstream.