Question

I perform an UDP request to a server via Ruby. The server’s response is mixed content, meaning I get strings, numbers and so on. I know how to interpret the response, but I’m having trouble with strings, since their length can vary. All strings are zero-terminated.

A string can look like this:

[84, 104, 101, 32, 83, 116, 114, 101, 97, 109, 33, 32, 50, 52, 47, 55,
32, 66, 97, 100, 119, 97, 116, 101, 114, 32, 91, 65, 108, 108, 116,
97, 108, 107, 93, 0]

It is encoded in UTF8 and stands for The Stream! 24/7 Badwater [Alltalk].

As already mentioned, there are more bytes in the response, not only a single string like above. All fixed-length content can easily be fetched with string.unpack, but I don’t how how to extract the strings. Do I have to parse the byte-stream manually or is there a way I can continue to use string.unpack?

Edit:

The whole response looks like this: http://paste.org/59395

The protocol details: http://tinyurl.com/bvyepsl

Answer 1

Oh I was not able to see the wood for the trees, sorry.

You easily can extract zero-terminated strings by using a_string.unpack("Z*")