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Andreas Smas, 2010-12-08 21:38
Message structure¶
A message can be of either map or list type. In a map each field has a name, in a list the members do not have names, but the order should be preserved.
The field types are:
||Name||ID||Description ||Map||1||Sub message of type map ||S64||2||Signed 64bit integer ||Str||3||UTF-8 encoded string ||Bin||4||Binary blob ||List||5||Sub message of type list
All in all the message structure is quite similar to JSON but most notably; no boolean nor null type exist and HTSMSG supports binary objects.
HTSMSG binary format¶
The binary format is designed to for back-to-back transmission of messages over a network (TCP) connection.
The root message must always be of type map.
Root body¶
||Length||4 byte integer||Total length of message (including this length field itself)
||Body||HTSMSG-Field * N||Fields in the root body
HTSMSG-Field¶
||Type||1 byte integer||Type of field (see field type IDs above)
||Namelength||1 byte integer||Length of name of field. If a field is part of a list message this must be 0
||Datalength||4 byte integer||Length of field data
||Name||N bytes||Field name, length as specified by Namelength
||Data||N bytes||Field payload, for details see below
Field encoding for type: map and list¶
The data is repeated HTSMSG-Fields exactly as the root body. Note the subtle difference in that for the root-message the length includes the 4 bytes of length field itself whereas in the field encoding the length written includes just the actual payload.
Field encoding for type: s64¶
Integers are encoded using a very simple variable length encoding. All leading bytes that are 0 is discarded. So to encode the value 100, datalength should be 1 and the data itself should be just one byte [0x64]. To encode 1337; datalength=2, data=[0x05 0x39].
Note that there is no sign extension in this encoding scheme so if you need to encode -1 you need to set datalength=8 and data = [0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff 0xff]. This can certainly be thought of as a bug, but it is the way it is.
Field encoding for type: str¶
Datalength should be the length of the string (NOT including the null terminating character). Thus the null terminator should not be present in data either.
Field encoding for type: bin¶
Datalength should be the length of the binary object. Data is the binary object itself.
Updated by Andreas Smas almost 14 years ago · 3 revisions