Lately i have been messing around with bittorrent protocol. I fail to see the point in bencoding files other than giving me headache in parsing them? What advantages does it have? Why not use xml?
/sarcasm
+3
A:
For one thing, I'm pretty sure bencoding is more space-efficient than equivalent XML.
Hank Gay
2009-06-26 01:29:10
Hank is right - it's much, much more space-efficient. Even putting the data in an XML file with single letter tags would nearly double the size of the tracker response. And, to be honest, I don't think XML wasn't nearly as big a standard back when they defined the bittorrent stuff.
Ben Gotow
2009-06-26 02:28:18