Transferring Binary Data

Transferring binary data such as floats, doubles, structs, unions, etc via sockets unfortunately isn't straightforward. The problem is that different architectures have different ways to represent such things; their structs, for example, may contain "holes" to promote word alignment restrictions. In other words, although the Simple Sockets Library will easily transfer binary images (using Sread(), Sreadbytes(), and Swrite()), different hardware and/or operating systems may interpret such binaries differently.

One may transfer such entities between hosts with the same architecture and o/s generally without problems.

When one has a heterogeneous admixture of platforms and operating systems, one may address this binary transfer problem in several ways.

For such things as short (two-byte) and long (four-byte) integers, the sockets libraries support functions such as