I don't understand why you'd want to replicate HTTP style interactions for this kind of job.
The headers are massive, take up most of the message and are overly verbose.
I know people fear binary protocols, but they really aren't something to worry about if you make the correct tools (after all, text is binary, its just there are a great many tools to read it.)
If you are serious and actually want to test your protocol/code, then you need to implement a parser that's useable. (either in wireshark or pipeable from netcat) You've done most of the work making the parse for the actual protocol, going the extra mile and wrapping it so it can take STDIN shouldn't be a terrible drag
Parsing a few bytes of extra text pales in comparison to sending anything across the network. For example in the time it takes to call an uncontended futex() on Intel Xeon, libxml2 can parse about a kilobyte of XML
The headers are massive, take up most of the message and are overly verbose.
I know people fear binary protocols, but they really aren't something to worry about if you make the correct tools (after all, text is binary, its just there are a great many tools to read it.)
If you are serious and actually want to test your protocol/code, then you need to implement a parser that's useable. (either in wireshark or pipeable from netcat) You've done most of the work making the parse for the actual protocol, going the extra mile and wrapping it so it can take STDIN shouldn't be a terrible drag