Question

all. I’m encountering what seems to be a very strange problem. (It could be that it’s far past when I should be asleep, and I’m overlooking something obvious.)

I have a []byte with length 8 as a result of some hex decoding. I need to produce a uint64 in order to use it. I have tried using binary.Uvarint(), from encoding/binary to do so, but it seems to only use the first byte in the array. Consider the following example.

package main

import (
    "encoding/binary"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    array := []byte{0x00, 0x01, 0x08, 0x00, 0x08, 0x01, 0xab, 0x01}
    num, _ := binary.Uvarint(array[0:8])
    fmt.Printf("%v, %x\n", array, num)
}

Here it is on play.golang.org.

When that is run, it displays the num as 0, even though, in hex, it should be 000108000801ab01. Furthermore, if one catches the second value from binary.Uvarint(), it is the number of bytes read from the buffer, which, to my knowledge, should be 8, even though it is actually 1.

Am I interpreting this wrong? If so, what should I be using instead?

Thanks, you all. 🙂

Answer 1

You’re decoding using a function whose use isn’t the one you need :

Varints are a method of encoding integers using one or more bytes;
numbers with smaller absolute value take a smaller number of bytes.
For a specification, see
http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/encoding.html.

It’s not the standard encoding but a very specific, variable byte number, encoding. That’s why it stops at the first byte whose value is less than 0x080.

As pointed by Stephen, binary.BigEndian and binary.LittleEndian provide useful functions to decode directly :

type ByteOrder interface {
    Uint16([]byte) uint16
    Uint32([]byte) uint32
    Uint64([]byte) uint64
    PutUint16([]byte, uint16)
    PutUint32([]byte, uint32)
    PutUint64([]byte, uint64)
    String() string
}

So you may use

package main

import (
    "encoding/binary"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    array := []byte{0x00, 0x01, 0x08, 0x00, 0x08, 0x01, 0xab, 0x01}
    num := binary.LittleEndian.Uint64(array)
    fmt.Printf("%v, %x", array, num)
}

or (if you want to check errors instead of panicking, thanks jimt for pointing this problem with the direct solution) :

package main

import (
    "encoding/binary"
    "bytes"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    array := []byte{0x00, 0x01, 0x08, 0x00, 0x08, 0x01, 0xab, 0x01}
    var num uint64
    err := binary.Read(bytes.NewBuffer(array[:]), binary.LittleEndian, &num)
    fmt.Printf("%v, %x", array, num)
}