i want to send a buffer of a certain length weather it has char 0s before the end of the string or not. is there a way around this?

You just supply the number of bytes you want to send as an argument to the send() function. There's no problems if the buffer contains 0s.

hmm. maybe i'm doing something else wrong then. for some reason when i receive i keep getting a pound sign at the end of my strings. maybe i just goofed somewhere else. i thought it was the 0 byte. thank you.