The pack vocabulary implements words for converting between byte buffers and Factor values. It supports reading and writing various numeric formats, and writing null-terminated strings.

The serialized format to convert to and from is defined by a string of characters, one per field, with different characters denoting different field types. In cases where there are different signed and unsigned variants for a type, a lower-case letter denotes a signed field and an upper-case letter an unsigned one; in cases where there is no distinction, either case can be used interchangeably. For example, a format string of "sCCID" denotes a format consisting of a signed 16-bit integer, followed by two unsigned 8-bit integers, one unsigned 32-bit integer, and one double-precision floating point value.

The complete list of supported field types:

C/c	Unsigned/signed 8-bit int (char)
S/s	Unsigned/signed 16-bit int (short)
T/t	Unsigned/signed 24-bit int
I/i	Unsigned/signed 32-bit int (long)
Q/q	Unsigned/signed 64-bit int (long long)
F/f	Single-precision (32-bit) IEEE floating point
D/d	Double-precision (64-bit) IEEE floating point
a	Null terminated string (write only)

Words for packing to byte sequences:

pack-native ( seq str -- bytes )

pack-be ( seq str -- bytes )

pack-le ( seq str -- bytes )

Words for unpacking from byte sequences:

unpack-native ( bytes str -- seq )

unpack-be ( bytes str -- seq )

unpack-le ( bytes str -- seq )

Words for unpacking from an input stream:

read-packed-native ( str -- seq )

read-packed-be ( str -- seq )

read-packed-le ( str -- seq )