Simplifying send() function

[SeanBannister]

I recently settled on this library, thanks for writing it! In the process I tested two other JS based OSC libraries and really enjoyed the simplicity of their send functions. I've included some code below where I've replicated this functionality and wanted to share it here in case anyone else finds it useful, or maybe it could be incorporated into the project:

This allows you to send an OSC message with a simple:
transmit('/address')
It also auto detects the type of arguments which i noticed the other JS libraries do, so you can specify and argument like:
transmit('/address', 'arg')
And it knows its a string.

But you can still manually specify types:
transmit('/address', { type: 'r', value: { r: 0, g: 255, b: 255, a: 1.0 }))

And you can still do bundles:

transmit(
  ['/address1'],
  ['/address2', 'arg'],
  ['/address3', { type: 'r',  value: { r: 0, g: 255, b: 255, a: 1.0 }]
);

And still supports multiple args:
transmit('/address', 'arg1', 'arg2')

I'm writing 100s of OSC sends in my code and this has really made it much easier to maintain.

For my use case I didn't need Time Tags so that would need to be added if this was used in the project, I also only setup auto detecting floats (f), integers (i), and strings (s).

function transmit(...args) {
  // Convert single message to array format
  const messages = Array.isArray(args[0]) ? args : [args];
  
  // Helper to determine type
  const getType = (value) => {
    if (typeof value === 'number') return Number.isInteger(value) ? 'i' : 'f';
    if (typeof value === 'string') return 's';
    return value.type;
  };

  // Helper to format arg
  const formatArg = (arg) => {
    if (arg && arg.type) return arg;
    return { type: getType(arg), value: arg };
  };

  // Format packets
  const packets = messages.map(([address, ...args]) => ({
    address,
    args: args.length ? args.map(formatArg) : undefined
  }));

  osc.send({
    timeTag: OSC.timeTag(0),
    packets
  });
}

[colinbdclark]

Hey, thanks for sharing this helper function! It looks nice and compact for cases where you're sending lots of small messages of different types in a bundle. In some ways, this is closer to the low-level representation of an OSC message, so it's something I might be able to provide in the API with the side effect of some additional memory-usage benefits too.

Just as a note, osc.js does support argument type inference if you set the metadata option to false. That implementation is also exposed in the low-level API as osc.inferTypeForArgument. So I think you could swap it for your getType() function, or just change your Port to not use metadata if you wanted to.

This looks great, thanks again for sharing it!

[SeanBannister]

Oh I totally missed that type inference was included. Awesome thanks!