I am having problems attaching a binary header(2 bytes that signify the length of the ASCII message) to the rest of the ASCII message properly. I am using a Winsock ActiveX TCPConrol Object to handle the communication. Here is my problem:

I need to concatenate the 2 Header bytes to the ASCII message because the Server application expects it that way. The size of the ASCII message will always be between 200 and 210 bytes. Again, the 2 Header bytes is just supposed to be a binary representation of the length of the ASCII message. Here's what I'm seeing:

If the ASCII message was 210 bytes, I would want to attach 2 bytes that represent the 16-bit integer 210 ->

00000000 11010010

to the front of the message. I am attempting to do this by using the CHR() command to create these bytes as that gives me a convenient format for attaching it to the ASCII message. From my understanding of characters and bytes, I should be able to emulate both of the above bytes by using ->

CHR(0) and CHR(210)

so literally, here is the code I'm using:

lcSendMessage = CHR(0) + CHR(LEN(lcASCIIMessage)) + lcASCIIMessage

My problem stems from the leftmost byte always being CHR(0) or 00000000 because the size of the ASCII message will never exceed 256. I notice the problem when viewing the transmission using Ethereal. For some reason, the 00000000 at the beginning of the message is getting read as a NULL(I do realize CHR(0) is a NULL) and causing all of the following bytes(211 in this case) to be set to 0 in the Data segment of the TCP transmission. What I really think is strange is that the size of the data segment is correct, 212 total bytes, but all are showing as zeroes. If I just leave off the leftmost header byte(making the header only one byte) then the rest of the message seems to be created/sent fine(i.e. lcSendMessage = CHR(LEN(lcASCIIMessage)) + lcAsciiMessage)

I've attempted using CreateBinary() to get around this problem, figuring that if I called CreateBinary() on the header portion and attached *that* to the ASCII message that all would be fine, but I'm actually having a hard time because CreateBinary() doesn't seem to be acting as I expected it to. Perhaps I am not using that command correctly here or perhaps I don't even need to use it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thx, Jon