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Good way to document a packet protocol

I've built a server and client which communicate with eachother using a raw tcp socket. What is a good way to document the packet's sent to eachother?

At the moment I use a wikia and create a new table foreach packet but the packets with loops and more complex structures are hard to read and it's hard to maintain a wikia.

So is there any software available which makes the packets easier to view or even more important easier to maintain.

Thank you

Solution

  • If you use something like Protocol Buffers, then you already have a high-level description of the binary data. In general, a good approach would be to maintain a high-level description of your structure somehow, and then write code that generates the serialisation and deserialisation functions.

    Then, the same code generator can generate human-readable documentation, too.