How to send/receive binary data over TCP using NodeMCU? - c

Question

I've been trying to mount a custom protocol over the TCP module on the NodeMCU platform. However, the protocol I try to embed inside the TCP data segment is binary, not ASCII-based(like HTTP for example), so sometimes it contains a NULL char (byte 0x00) ending the C string inside the TCP module implementation, causing that part of the message inside the packet get lost.
-- server listens on 80, if data received, print data to console and send "hello world" back to caller
-- 30s time out for a inactive client
sv = net.createServer(net.TCP, 30)
function receiver(sck, data)
print(data)
sck:close()
end
if sv then
sv:listen(80, function(conn)
conn:on("receive", receiver)
conn:send("hello world")
end)
end
*This is a simple example which, as you can see, the 'receiver' variable is a callback function which prints the data from the TCP segment retrieved by the listener.
How can this be fixed? is there a way to circumvent this using the NodeMCU library? Or do I have to implement another TCP module or modify the current one's implementation to support arrays or tables as a return value instead of using strings?
Any suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

The data you receive in the callback should not be truncated. You can check this for yourself by altering the code as follows:
function receiver(sck, data)
print("Len: " .. #data)
print(data)
sck:close()
end
You will observe, that, while the data is indeed only printed up to the first zero byte (by the print()-function), the whole data is present in the LUA-String data and you can process it properly with 8-bit-safe (and zerobyte-safe) methods.
While it should be easy to modify the print()-function to also be zerobyte-safe, I do not consider this as a bug, since the print function is meant for texts. If you want to write binary data to serial, use uart.write(), i.e.
uart.write(0, data)