Ask Your Question

Revision history [back]

click to hide/show revision 1
initial version

What does it mean here by Label?

It means that the field doesn't have a value, and just acts as a "label" for other data in the packet.

It should be used for "composite" data, such as structures and arrays, for example. However, it shouldn't be used for uninterpreted blobs of bytes in the packet, but people might use it instead of "Sequence of bytes", for example, because they don't want a large blob of bytes to display as a whole bunch of hex digits.

Wireshark should probably allow the developer to indicate whether a "Sequence of bytes" displays as the hex data or as, for example, the count of bytes, e.g.

Frobozz: DEADBEEFCAFEBABE

vs.

Frobozz: 16 bytes

and the cases where "Label" is used for uninterpreted blobs of bytes should be changed to work that way.

(For the benefit of Wireshark developers reading this, "Label" means FT_NONE and "Sequence of bytes" means FT_BYTES.)