Question

I’m dealing with a COM port application and we have a defined variable-length packet structure that I’m talking to a micro-controller with. The packet has delimiters for the start and stop bytes. The trouble is that sometimes the read buffer can contain extraneous characters. It seems like I’ll always get the whole packet, just some extra chatter before/after the actual data. So I have a buffer that I append data to whenever new data is received from the COM port. What is the best way to search this buffer for any possible occurrences of my packet? For example:

Say my packet delimiter is 0xFF and I have an array as such

{ 0x00, 0xFF, 0x02, 0xDA, 0xFF, 0x55, 0xFF, 0x04 }

How can I create a function/LINQ-statment that returns all subarrays that start and end with the delimiter (almost like a sliding-correlator with wildcards)?

The sample would return the following 3 arrays:

{0xFF, 0x02, 0xDA, 0xFF}, {0xFF, 0x55, 0xFF}, and
{0xFF, 0x02, 0xDA, 0xFF, 0x55, 0xFF}

Answer 1

Here’s how you can do this using LINQ …

int[] list = new int[] { 0x00, 0xFF, 0x02, 0xDA, 0xFF, 0x55, 0xFF, 0x04 };
int MAXLENGTH = 10;

var windows = list.Select((element, i) => list.Skip(i).Take(MAXLENGTH));
var matched = windows.Where(w => w.First() == 0xFF);
var allcombinations = matched.SelectMany(m => Enumerable.Range(1, m.Count())
          .Select(i => m.Take(i)).Where(x => x.Count() > 2 && x.Last() == 0xFF));

Or using indexes:

int length = list.Count();
var indexes = Enumerable.Range(0, length)
              .SelectMany(i => Enumerable.Range(3, Math.Min(length-i, MAXLENGTH))
              .Select(count => new {i, count}));
var results = indexes.Select(index => list.Skip(index.i).Take(index.count))
              .Where(x => x.First() == 0xFF && x.Last() == 0xFF);