I am new to perl. I need to write a golang code which read UDP package sent from a perl UDP socket client. Basically, the perl client packs data using the template "N/a* N/a*" like the following:
$them = pack($sockaddr,&AF_INET, $data_port, $broadaddr);
$actual_data = pack("N/a* N/a*", $string1, $string2);
send(S,$actual_data,0,$them) || die $!;
My question is:
- What does "N/a* N/a*" actually means? A simple explanation would be helpful. How two strings are actually packed?
- How i can write a similar packing function in golang given two unicode strings; and if I got a packed buffer sent from perl UDP client, how i can write a corresponding function "in golang" to unpack it. Is there any library which can handle this so that I can use golang on par with perl for socket programming.
From the pack documentation:
N
is an unsigned long in network format
a
is a string with arbitrary binary data
*
is a repeat count that uses up the rest of the characters in the string
- the
/
notes that you're packing a length of the item and then the packed item.
You can write a small program to check it out:
use v5.10;
my $first = 'dog';
my $second = 'parrot';
my $packed = pack "N/a* N/a*", $first, $second;
say $packed;
Run it and you won't see the number, but you can hexdump it to see everything:
$ perl5.22.0 pack.pl
dogparrot
$ perl5.22.0 pack.pl | hexdump -C
00000000 00 00 00 03 64 6f 67 00 00 00 06 70 61 72 72 6f |....dog....parro|
00000010 74 0a |t.|
00000012
There's a 00_00_00_03
in front of dog
and a 00_00_00_06
in front of parrot
. Those are the lengths of the packed strings. This probably means the other side scans the string by reading the number, then grabbing that number of succeeding octets.