Bencode


Bencode is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured data.
It supports four different types of values:
Bencoding is most commonly used in torrent files, and as such is part of the BitTorrent specification. These metadata files are simply bencoded dictionaries.
While less efficient than a pure binary encoding, bencoding is simple and is unaffected by endianness, which is important for a cross-platform application like BitTorrent. It is also fairly flexible, as long as applications ignore unexpected dictionary keys, so that new ones can be added without creating incompatibilities.

Encoding algorithm

Bencode uses ASCII characters as delimiters and digits.
Bencode is a very specialized kind of binary coding with some unique properties:
However, this uniqueness can cause some problems: