Basic Serial Comm. Code Problem

With microcontrollers, usually you know up-front how much space you need. If you don't know what length of

characters (e.g. aaaaaa, ddddddddd, wwwwwwww in your example) to expect, then you need to resort to using

large buffers or malloc to get what you want. It's not efficient, and generally not a good idea on a small microcontroller

at all for additional reasons.

Microcontrollers are usually programmed and then used for fixed defined purposes, so try to set your serial format to

be fixed length and well defined too, for the purpose that you need to use it for. It shouldn't need to expect

random length parameters over the serial port (or at least set a limit).

What you're asking for can be done (nothing is impossible in code) but it's not a trivial amount of code,

and most people don't like to write too much code that won't be reusable. Better to come up with a simpler

serial protocol (i.e. set of rules) for yourself, and your code would be smaller and more reusable for

yourself in future. For example, replacing your double-digit identifier with a single digit means your code

will be a lot simpler. Do you really need two digit identifiers? (These are the types of questions to ask yourself).

With microcontrollers, usually you know up-front how much space you need. If you don't know what length of

characters (e.g. aaaaaa, ddddddddd, wwwwwwww in your example) to expect, then you need to resort to using

large buffers or malloc to get what you want. It's not efficient, and generally not a good idea on a small microcontroller

at all for additional reasons.

Microcontrollers are usually programmed and then used for fixed defined purposes, so try to set your serial format to

be fixed length and well defined too, for the purpose that you need to use it for. It shouldn't need to expect

random length parameters over the serial port (or at least set a limit).

What you're asking for can be done (nothing is impossible in code) but it's not a trivial amount of code,

and most people don't like to write too much code that won't be reusable. Better to come up with a simpler

serial protocol (i.e. set of rules) for yourself, and your code would be smaller and more reusable for

yourself in future. For example, replacing your double-digit identifier with a single digit means your code

will be a lot simpler. Do you really need two digit identifiers? (These are the types of questions to ask yourself).