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Octets

Restriction: This topic applies only when the Enterprise Server feature is enabled.

COBOL programmers are used to working with memory physically organized into groups of eight bits, and calling these groups bytes. However, in communications, where we are talking about a continuous stream of bits on the wire, each group of eight bits is called an octet.

The ASN.1 encoding rules define four types of octet: identifier octet, length octet, contents octet, and end-of-content octet. There's no need to go into detail here about exactly how these are used (it's different for different encoding rules anyway); it suffices to say that the contents octets contain the actual data, while the others are needed for the syntax of the encoded bit-stream.

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