I found sample code for interrogating NTP servers on https://www.mattcrampton.com/blog/query_an_ntp_server_from_python/. The code is brief and well-written, but I don't understand the use of struct.unpack. This is the core code: client = socket.socket(AF_INET,SOCK_DGRAM) client.sendto(msg.encode('utf-8'),address) msg,address = client.recvfrom(buf) t = struct.unpack("!12I",msg)[10] It returns an integer value (seconds from 1900-01-01) but I have two questions: How does the unpack work in this instance? How did he arrive at "!12I" to do the decoding? Is it possible to get a floating point value from the remote server? Continue reading...
