There are several methods for variable-length encoding of integers for transmission over a network. The most recent one I encountered was defined in section 16 of the QUIC protocol specification. In that document, 64-bit integers are encoded as 1, 2, 4, or 8 octets based on the value of the integer. Another format is specified in Appendix B of the CBOR specification, which specifies how to encode any one of the typical integer sizes commonly used on modern computers today. Using a rigid encoding like these offers a means of quickly serializing data, but at a cost of increasing the number of octets required. In the case of CBOR, it perhaps isn’t accurate to refer to it as a variable-length encoding, but rather an encoding for each possible signed and unsigned integer type. However, the effect is more-or-less similar, though larger integers are encoded with less space efficiency.
When considering space-efficiency, one encoding approach is to encode integers so that the MSb of each serialized octet indicates whether this is the final octet or whether there is another octet to consume. The following illustrates that idea:
10000011 11111111 01111111
^ ^ ^--- 0 == final octet
Here, if a 1 is present as the MSb, it means the next octet is a part of the integer. If the MSb is a 0, it indicates this octet is the last octet in the serialized sequence of octets. Following this method, a value between 0 and 127 can be serialized into a single octet, while incrementally larger integers consume additional octets. This method can be used for both unsigned and signed integers, where the signed integers are stored in twos-complement format.
Serializing and deserializing data can be efficient. This library has functions
that will perform those operations on a buffer given an unsigned or signed
64-bit integer. This code uses C++ constexpr functions, though these could
easily be transformed into C macros if one prefers those.
The library is composed of just a few functions to perform variable-length encoding of integers as described above. Those functions are:
- VarIntEncoder::Serialize()
- VarIntEncoder::Deserialize()
There are two forms of each, one accepting an unsigned integer and one accepting a signed integer to be serialized or deserialized. They are fully documented in the varint_encoder.h header file.