recvint

Recvint is a symbolic function name used in programming to denote the action of receiving an integer value from a stream, socket, or inter-process communication channel. It is not a formal standard, but appears in documentation and example code across languages to describe a primitive alongside others that read binary data. The function typically reads a fixed-size integer (commonly 32 or 64 bits) and either returns the value or writes it to a caller-provided output location. Implementations may specify endianness, returning data in host order or in a defined byte order.

Networked contexts usually store integers in network byte order, so readers convert using appropriate endianness conversion functions. Behavior can be blocking or non-blocking; it may return a value after a full read or signal partial completion. Error handling covers end-of-stream, timeouts, and I/O errors.

Usage: recvint is used in binary protocols, file I/O for fixed-width numeric fields, and inter-process messages where compact numeric fields are encoded in binary form. Variants may allow specifying size (e.g., 16-, 32-, 64-bit) and signedness.

Considerations: ensure correct handling of partial reads, validate that the received value falls within expected ranges, and guard against malformed data. In higher-level languages, equivalents exist as read methods followed by integer parsing, or built-in binary I/O utilities.

See also: read, recv, ntohl/ntohs, byte order, binary I/O, streaming parsers.