5.2.7. Packing / Unpacking Values

A few of Spicy’s atomic types support low-level conversion from, or into, a binary representation through two operators:

• pack(VALUE, ARGS) turns a VALUE into a sequence of raw bytes representing the value in binary form. ARGS specify what encoding to use for the representation; they are type-specific (see below for a list). The pack operator returns a bytes instance containing the encoded data.

  As an example, pack(uint16(513), spicy::ByteOrder::Network) returns \x02\x01, which is 513 in network byte order.

• unpack<TYPE>(DATA, ARGS) parses a value of type TYPE from a binary representation DATA. ARGS specify what encoding to expect for DATA. The unpack operator returns a 2-tuple (VALUE, REMAINDER) where VALUE is the parsed value, and REMAINDER is any bytes left over from DATA that weren’t used for parsing the value. If parsing fails, unpack throws an InvalidValue exception.

  As an example, unpack<uint16>(b"\x02\x01XYZ", spicy::ByteOrder::Network) returns the tuple (513, b"XYZ").

The following table summarizes the types that currently support packing/unpacking, along with the encoding arguments that the operators expect for each:

Type	pack	unpack	Links
Address	pack(VALUE, spicy::ByteOrder)	unpack<addr>(DATA, spicy::ByteOrder)	Address Family, Byte Order
Integer	pack(VALUE, spicy::ByteOrder)	unpack<uintX|intX>(DATA, spicy::ByteOrder)	Address Family, Byte Order
Real	pack(VALUE, spicy::RealType, spicy::ByteOrder)	unpack<uintX|intX>(DATA, spicy::RealType, spicy::ByteOrder)	Real Type [1], Byte Order

Note

[1] Packing a real value as IEEE754_Single may loose information.