From: cremes.devlist@...
Date: 2006-02-02T02:04:02+09:00
Subject: Re: IO and non-strings


On Feb 1, 2006, at 10:31 AM, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote:

> On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Mark Volkmann wrote:
>
>> On 2/1/06, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>> [snip]
>> Will I have to first send a number to the server that indicates  
>> the number
>> of bytes I'm going to send next so it will know how many to read?
>
> that certainly makes it easier in some cases.  be careful about the  
> length of
> the lenght though; for instance, if you decide to send something like
> 'length:data' to the client then
>
>   42:foobar    # length length == 2
>   4242:foobar    # length length == 4
>
> might want the client to read chars, based on return value of  
> select, into a
> re-sizeable buf until ':' is seen and then convert to int to do a  
> read(n).

If you want a general mechanism for doing this type of work between  
Ruby and Other Languages, use NetStrings [1]. If it's Ruby to Ruby,  
drb is a great choice. (Oh, there is also a Ruby NetStrings class [2]  
but I can't vouch for its correctness.)

cr

[1] http://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt
[2] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/djb-netstrings/