Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
3.9 Fixed-length Opaque Data

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3.9 Fixed-length Opaque Data

3.9 Fixed-length Opaque Data

At times, fixed-length uninterpreted data needs to be passed among machines. This data is called "opaque" and is declared as follows:

         opaque identifier[n];

where the constant n is the (static) number of bytes necessary to contain the opaque data. If n is not a multiple of four, then the n bytes are followed by enough (0 to 3) residual zero bytes, r, to make the total byte count of the opaque object a multiple of four.

          0        1     ...
      +--------+--------+...+--------+--------+...+--------+
      | byte 0 | byte 1 |...|byte n-1|    0   |...|    0   |
      +--------+--------+...+--------+--------+...+--------+
      |<-----------n bytes---------->|<------r bytes------>|
      |<-----------n+r (where (n+r) mod 4 = 0)------------>|
                                                   FIXED-LENGTH OPAQUE


Next: 3.10 Variable-length Opaque Data

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
3.9 Fixed-length Opaque Data