# Parsing characters from Binary data

**URL:** <https://community.solace.com/t/parsing-characters-from-binary-data/1899>\
**Category:** Solace Event Broker\
**Tags:** solace-cloud, solace-pubsub-cache, dead-message-queue-configuration, solacepubsub\
**Created:** [April 7, 2024, 6:04am UTC](https://community.solace.com/t/parsing-characters-from-binary-data/1899 "2024-04-07T06:04:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Naruto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/6bbea6/32.png) [@Naruto](https://community.solace.com/u/Naruto)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2024, 6:04am UTC](https://community.solace.com/t/parsing-characters-from-binary-data/1899/1 "2024-04-07T06:04:14Z")

</div>

Hi @marc.dipasquale@Aaron@all  
I am deserialising some stream of binary data using the payload format as —

typedef struct {

char messageType; // ‘N’ or ‘G’ (‘N’ – New Normal Order, ‘G’ – New Spread Order)

long timestamp; // Numeric Time in nanoseconds from 01-Jan-1980 00:00:00

double orderID; // Numeric Day Unique Order Reference Number

int token;  
char orderType; // ‘B’ - Buy Order, ‘S’ - Sell Order int price;  
int quantity; // Numeric Quantity of the order

} OrderStruct;  
After the deserialisation , there are some unwanted data for char bytes being fetched.  
for example —  
Order 1: Type:^P Timestamp:1929249811 OrderID:0.000000 Token:74732288 OrderType:^@ Price:1364066304 Quantity:2127492296  
The first 16 bytes are for snapshot header. That is being fetched correctly. The problem occurs after the 16 bytes i.e. while fetching the order messages.  
w

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Aaron](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/solace/user_avatar/community.solace.com/aaron/32/843_2.png) [@Aaron](https://community.solace.com/u/Aaron)\
**Post date:** [April 8, 2024, 3:42am UTC](https://community.solace.com/t/parsing-characters-from-binary-data/1899/2 "2024-04-08T03:42:33Z")

</div>

Hi @Naruto . Ok… is this C? This is just your data structure format, the “in-memory” representation within your app. But doesn’t say how the data is **encoded** _on the wire_ . You need that information from the publisher application or documentation. Trying to reverse engineer it is hard! For example:

- If there are only 2 options for `messageType` , it could be encoded as a single bit! Or maybe a whole ASCII char (1 byte), or a UTF-16 char (2 bytes)? Or maybe 4 bytes to allow for future expansion, and is a custom encoding.
- If your timestamp is nanos since epoch, it should look something like `1712321293665926900` (which is right now). Not `1929249811` EDIT: just noticed that it’s nanos since Jan 1 **1980** , not 1970 like normal epoch. That’s odd…? So the expected number should be quite a bit smaller than the one above, something like: `1396745293665926900`
- `orderID` is a double? Are you sure? That seems very odd. That should certainly be an int or long. Or a String.
- You have control/escape characters `^@` and `^P` listed, which probably correspond to binary 0x00 and 0x10. These aren’t ASCII chars.
- A quantity of 2,127,492,296? Someone is buying or selling 2.1 billion items?

Please go and ask the application developers/architects for the encoding format for these messages.