What is a function selector?

Question

I am reading an article, it says:

To enable deployment on the Ethereum platform, the contract functions are compiled into EVM bytecode and a piece of code called function selector is added, which serves as an entry point into the contract code.

Can some body please tell me what is a function selector?

I tried google and found:

The first four bytes of the call data for a function call specifies the function to be called. It is the first (left, high-order in big-endian) four bytes of the Keccak-256 (SHA-3) hash of the signature of the function. The signature is defined as the canonical expression of the basic prototype without data location specifier, i.e. the function name with the parenthesised list of parameter types. Parameter types are split by a single comma - no spaces are used.

I can't understand what is call data?

Some body please guide me.

Zulfi.

Answer 1

A function selector allows you to perform dynamic invocation of a function, based on the name of the function and the type of each one of the input arguments.

For example, suppose you have:

contract Contract1 {
    function func(uint256 x, uint8 y) public returns (uint32, uint32) {...}
}

contract Contract2 {
    Contract1 public contract1 = new Contract1();
    function func() public returns (uint32, uint32) {...}
}

Then you can call Contract1.func from Contract2.func as follows:

function func() public returns (uint32, uint32) {
    uint32[2] memory ret;

    address dest = address(contract1);

    bytes4 selector = contract1.func.selector;
    // Or bytes4 selector = bytes4(uint256(keccak256("func(uint256,uint8)") >> 224));

    bytes memory data = abi.encodeWithSelector(selector, uint256(789), uint8(123));

    assembly {
        let success := call(
            gas,           // pass the remaining gas to the function
            dest,          // the address of the contract1 instance
            0,             // pass 0 wei to the function
            add(data, 32), // the actual data starts after the length of 'data'
            mload(data),   // the length of 'data' appears at the first 32 bytes
            ret,           // the address of the output
            8              // the size of the output
        )
        if iszero(success) {
            revert(0, 0)
        }
    }

    return (ret[0], ret[1]);
}

If the invoked function is constant (either pure or view), then you can also use staticcall.

The example above is in assembly, but you can also use call directly in solidity.

I think that staticcall should be available starting from solidity v0.5.0.

Answer 2

A function selector is the first four bytes of the calldata that specifies which function to call during a function call. For example, contract.call(abi.encodeWithSignature("transfer(address,uint256)", 0xtheAddressArgument, number/amount)) During execution, the first 4 bytes from the abi.encodeWithSignature(....) in the above example represents the funtion's selector.