Question

link

How to serialize strings and pass it over the network and de-serialize the string?

The string may contain any possible character out of 256 valid characters.

Solution

The difficulty is how to differentiate between data (string) and metadata. Some interesting ideas:

1. XML
2. message with header + body

The best is the top answer:

I think that a good answer is to send the length of the string in bytes (coded for example as a 4 bytes unsigned integer) followed by the list of bytes, one per char.

The receiver reads the first 4 bytes and understand the string length (let says L), then it reads the following L bytes and build the string.

Code

eg. 5hello 5world 2my 4name 2is