It looks like your subsequent decoding is going to vary based on the message ID?
If so, you will likely want to use unpack_from which allows you to pull only the first member from the data (as written now, your initial unpack call will generate an exception because the buffer you're handing it is not the right size). You can then have code that varies the unpacking format string based on the message ID. That code could look something like this:
from struct import pack, unpack, unpack_from
while True:
data = conn.recv(BUFFER_SIZE)
# End of file, bail out of loop
if not data: break
mid = unpack_from('!h', data)[0]
if mid == 0:
# Message ID 0
types = '!hhh'
_, x, y = unpack(types, data)
# Process message type 0
...
elif mid == 1:
types = '!hIIq'
_, v, w, z = unpack(types, data)
# Process message type 1
...
elif mid == 2:
...
Note that we're unpacking the message ID again in each case along with the ID-specific parameters. You could avoid that if you like by using the optional offset argument to unpack_from:
x, y = unpack_from('!hh', data, offset=2)
One other note of explanation: If you are sending messages between two different machines, you should consider the "endianness" (byte ordering). Not all machines are "little-endian" like x86. Accordingly it's conventional to send integers and other structured numerics in a certain defined byte order - traditionally that has been "network byte order" (which is big-endian) but either is okay as long as you're consistent. You can easily do that by prepending each format string with '!' or '<' as shown above (you'll need to do that for every format string on both sides).
Finally, the above code probably works fine for a simple "toy" application but as your program increases in scope and complexity, you should be aware that there is no guarantee that your single recv call actually receives all the bytes that were sent and no other bytes (such as bytes from a subsequently sent buffer). In other words, it's often necessary to add a buffering layer, or otherwise ensure that you have received and are operating on exactly the number of bytes you intended.
