How does "Unflatten From String" take a type and return a value of that type?

Question

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361E-01/glang/unflatten_from_string/
How exactly does the "type" argument for "Unflatten From String" work? I need to create a VI that takes a type, passes it as an argument to several calls of the "Unflatten From String" function, and returns an array containing elements of the type originally passed. The "Unflatten From String" function seems to do some magic though, because the type of the "value" that it outputs changes depending on the type it is passed as input. How do I do the same magic in my VI?
Ultimately, what I need to accomplish is an unflatten-list operation. Given a type T and a byte string of length L (which contains a concatenation of T elements that are flattened to their bytes), create a VI that unflattens all the types in the string and return an array of length (L / sizeof(T)) that contains each type.
Note: performing the unflatten-list operation is trivial, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do it in a VI that takes a type and returns an array of the appropriate type. By the way, my data is being given to me from another source, so please don't bother suggesting that I should be flattening an array using LabVIEW's "Flatten To String" function in the first place. My data is not given in LabVIEW's array format: http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361B-01/lvconcepts/flattened_data/
Thanks a ton!
-Wakka

Answer 1

Take a look at this example:  You can see that the flattened string contains several bytes.  The first four bytes contain the length of array (number of elements).  Since the data type is U32, the next 32 bits (4 bytes) contains the value of the first element, and so on.  Could you possibly use this scheme to do what you want to do?  Other data types present different outputs.  You would have to experiment with them.
- tbob
Inventor of the WORM Global