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]

It does have the added complexity of maintaining order, so whilst decode isn't affected, encoding will be. XML on the other hand does not impose any ordering during encoding, but does require the production of extra bytes. However as Christopher implies, XML is way more inefficient to decode. --Angryjames (talk) 00:43, 8 October 2008 (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]

I think you're splitting hairs. A bencode implementation is highly likely to implement encoding and decoding recursively. Schwatoo (talk) 01:41, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dictionary Sorting

Page fails to mention that dictionary elements should be sorted by key. In the trivia section it mentions "there is only a single valid bencoding", without ordered dictionaries this wouldn't be possible. Schwatoo (talk) 01:37, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Not just ordered dictionaries, surely lists must also be ordered. Since the bencoding must be unique (bijection), and comparable without decode, does this not mean that the list element must be ordered in some way? In the example l4:spami42e, is each element compared as an ASCII string, e.g. '4:spam' compared to 'i42e'? --Angryjames (talk) 00:36, 8 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Extending Bencoding

Bencoding as presented doesn't really handle some basic types. UTF-8 strings are mentioned in the artlcle. But bencode doesn't provide encodings for some very basic types: floats, bools, sets, etc. There has been some work to extend bencoding to support more types. Should this be included or linked to in the wikipedia article? See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2007q3/029292.html for more. Schwatoo (talk) 01:44, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]