title: How to publish multiple numbers via MQTT?
body: <p>I'm working on remotecontrolling a watering system via smartphone using MQTT to control the valves connected to a raspberry pi. 
  Up till now, I had the raspberry pi subscribe to multiple topics ('watering/frontLawn', 'watering/backLawn') and interpret the payload as the watering duration. 
  Now I want to add a way to schedule waterings, which requires to additionally send the time, when the watering is supposed to take place. So <code>startTime</code> and <code>duration</code> needs to be send on a specific topic. 
  Something like <code>wateringInfo = [1563532789, 300] # in the form [startTime, duration]</code></p>
  
  <p>Is there a recommended way of transferring information like this?</p>
  
  <p>So far my only idea was to combine the two numbers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>startTime*1000+duration # assuming duration is maxed at 999
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>send them
  and retrieve using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>retrievedStartTime = int(msg.payload) / 1000
  retrievedDuration = int(msg.payload) % 1000
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This seems like an error prone way of doing things. Is there a different way, maybe even directly transfer the array?</p>