Bencode - BitTorrent serialisation format
version 1.4
use Bencode qw( bencode bdecode );
my $bencoded = bencode { 'age' => 25, 'eyes' => 'blue' };
print $bencoded, "\n";
my $decoded = bdecode $bencoded;
This module implements the BitTorrent bencode serialisation format as described in http://www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html.
bencode( $datastructure )Takes a single argument which may be a scalar or a reference to a scalar, array or hash. Arrays and hashes may in turn contain values of these same types. Simple scalars that look like canonically represented integers will be serialised as such. To bypass the heuristic and force serialisation as a string, use a reference to a scalar.
Croaks on unhandled data types.
bdecode( $string [, $do_lenient_decode [, $max_depth ] ] )Takes a string and returns the corresponding deserialised data structure.
If you pass a true value for the second option, it will disregard the sort order of dict keys. This violation of the bencode format is somewhat common.
If you pass an integer for the third option, it will croak when attempting to parse dictionaries nested deeper than this level, to prevent DoS attacks using maliciously crafted input.
Croaks on malformed data.
trailing garbage at %sYour data does not end after the first bencode-serialised item.
You may also get this error if a malformed item follows.
garbage at %sYour data is malformed.
unexpected end of data at %sYour data is truncated.
unexpected end of string data starting at %sYour data includes a string declared to be longer than the available data.
malformed string length at %sYour data contained a string with negative length or a length with leading zeroes.
malformed integer data at %sYour data contained something that was supposed to be an integer but didn't make sense.
dict key not in sort order at %sYour data violates the bencode format constaint that dict keys must appear in lexical sort order.
duplicate dict key at %sYour data violates the bencode format constaint that all dict keys must be unique.
dict key is not a string at %sYour data violates the bencode format constaint that all dict keys be strings.
dict key is missing value at %sYour data contains a dictionary with an odd number of elements.
nesting depth exceeded at %sYour data contains dicts or lists that are nested deeper than the $max_depth passed to bdecode().
unhandled data typeYou are trying to serialise a data structure that consists of data types other than
The format does not support this.
Strings and numbers are practically indistinguishable in Perl, so bencode() has to resort to a heuristic to decide how to serialise a scalar. This cannot be fixed.
Please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at http://github.com/ap/Bencode/issues.
Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de>
This software is copyright (c) 2010 by Aristotle Pagaltzis.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
