Data types

All data sent over the network is big-endian, that is the bytes are sent from most significant byte to least significant byte. The majority of everyday computers are little-endian, therefore it may be necessary to change the endianness before sending data over the network.

Other than 'String' and 'Metadata', which are decoded with a custom function, these data formats are identical to those provided by the Java classes DataInputStream and DataOutputStream.

	Size	Range	Notes
bool	1	0 or 1	Value can be either true (0x01) or false (0x00)
byte	1	-128 to 127	Signed, two's complement
short	2	-32768 to 32767	Signed, two's complement
int	4	-2147483648 to 2147483647	Signed, two's complement
long	8	-9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807	Signed, two's complement
float	4	See this	Single-precision 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point
double	8	See this	Double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point
string	≥ 2 ≤ 240	N/A	UTF-16 big-endian string prefixed by a short containing the length of the string in code units (as a UTF-16 code unit is 2 bytes, multiply the length by two to get the length in bytes). UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding so each code point may be 1 or 2 code units. Accordingly the specified length (in code units) does not necessarily map onto the logical length of the string (in code points).
metadata	Varies	See this

Some data may be stored as an "absolute integer", which is a more precise kind of integer, and a less precise kind of double. The conversion from double to absolute integer is like so:

abs_int = (int)double * 32;

And back again:

double = (double)abs_int / 32;