Serialize Strings, ints and floats to character arrays for networking WITHOUT LIBRARIES

Question

I want to transmit data over the network, but I don\'t want to use any foreign libraries (Standard C/C++ is ok).

for example:

unsigned int x = 123;
c         


        

Answer 1

Ah, you want to serialize primitive data types! In principle, there are two approaches: The first one is, that you just grab the internal, in-memory binary representation of the data you want to serialize, reinterpret it as a character, and use that as you representation:

So if you have a:

double d;

you take the address of that, reinterpret that pointer as a pointer to character, and then use these characters:

double *pd=&d;
char *pc = reinterpret_cast(pd); 
for(size_t i=0; i

This works with all primitive data types. The main problem here is, that the binray representation is implementation dependent (mainly CPU dependent). (And you will run into subtle bugs when you try doing this with IEEE NANs...).

All in all, this approach is not portable at all, as you have no control at all over the representation of your data.

The second approach is, to use a higher-level representation, that you yourself have under control. If performance is not an issue, you could use std::strstream and the >> and << operators to stream primitive C type variables into std::strings. This is slow but easy to read and debug, and very portable on top of it.