Talk:Bencode

How does bencoding actually work?

The examples of bencoding given are much, much less helpful than they should be as they are not accompanied by an explanation of how the process operates, which is far from self-evident from the examples. It's similar to having a page entitled "foocoding" and having an example saying "the foocoded form of bar is baz, and the foocoded form of quux is xyzzy". Not very helpful without an explanation of how the clear text and cyphertext relate to each other.Thisisnotme 12:37, 12 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I expanded the article by describing how it works (as well as adding some explanations, a few of its properties, and making a few corrections). I retained most of the examples. 130.89.167.52 21:25, 14 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Efficiency

"While not particularly efficient, bencoding is simple"

Not efficient compared to what? Certainly not XML, at least. I guess only byte-encoding the string lengths would gain you anything (notwithstanding some sort of compression)? — Christopher (talk) @ 23:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're right. Wording changed, comparing bencode to a pure binary encoding. --Kwi | Talk 23:26, 23 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Recursion

I've removed a fragment in the the Encoding algorithm section stating that Bencoding "is defined recursively." In actuality there is nothing recursive about Bencode's definition. And while bencoded dictionaries allow composition (a dictionary may contain another dictionary), recursion is not possible (a dictionary cannot contain itself.) — Foorider (talk) 01:00, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]