Hi, I've got a client-server socket setup, where the connection is kept open for a long time, and the client sends some commands to the server when it wants to, each command is a mixture of ascii and binary, say of the form: 
START NAME FOO PAIRS 4 A 3 B 5 C 1.2 D some_binary_data_with_first_byt
+e_indicating_length

[download]
here the PAIRS value 4 indicates how many pairs are there afterwards (e.g., 4: A, B, C, D). I need to be able to handle the following situations: (1)commands may come in succession contineously, or very sparsely; (2) commands need to be processed right away if it is complete, so can't wait for the start of the next command; (3)there might not be a separator at the end of the command, even not a space; (4) command may be corrupted, so "START" can appear before the last one is done, in which case, ignore the last one

I'm thinking I may need to implement a DFA myself, but that's already part of the built-in regex engine, so is there an easy way?

greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

In reply to regex for a socket stream by johnnywang

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