Packet-based TCP comms Helper

[Kneel]

If you are talking using text based protocols, Kip's TCP.au3 event driven UDF is great. But what happens if you want to talk to a 3rd party providers device/software that talks using binary format data in packet form? What if the packet size is variable? PTCP is a wrapper around Kip's TCP.au3 that lets you focus on dealing with the packets, rather than figuring out how to determine if there is a complete packet available etc.
 For sending, you just send a binary string (the actual packet data)

 For receiving, you just get a complete packet - even if the packet size is variable!

How? When you connect, you pass an AutoIt expression that tells PTCP how to tell if a packet is complete. For fixed sized packets, that's easy - just pass the number of bytes. For variable length packets, the expression can contain references to the packet data itself, as well as the number of bytes currently in the Rx buffer. This means you can specify the packet size as some combination of bytes in the packet.

An example might be: "($iAvail>7)?((BitAND(BinaryMid($aPacket,7,1), '0xff'))+(BitShift(BitAND(BinaryMid($aPacket,8,1),'0xff'),-8))+8):(0)"

This says: we need at least 8 bytes of the packet to know the packet size; once we have these 8 bytes, the packet size is stored in bytes 7 & 8 as little-endian (LSB first)

Other than the packetizing details, it's pretty much just Kip's event driven TCP code.

Hope you find it useful.

PTCP.au3