ap/bencode

BitTorrent serialisation format

bencode's Issues

doc: Broken link

The link http://www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html is broken: 404.

Need clear behavior for strings with utf8 flag set

The base bencoding format specifies encoding only for strings of bytes, not Unicode strings. When decoding, there is no way to distinguish if the original data was an UTF-8 string or a byte buffer that appears to look like an UTF-8 string.

The module documentation should clearly specify (and the implementation be tested) how Perl strings with the utf8 flag given in the input to bencode will be handled. Throwing an exception would be an appropriate behavior, in order to force the user of the module to properly encode its data as bytes.

The bdecode function should clearly disallow a string of characters and allow only a string of bytes.

Warnings thrown on 'undef' elements

When passing a Perl structure containing 'undef' values to the 'bencode' subroutine like so:

use Bencode qw/bencode bdecode/;
use Data::Dumper;

my $x = [1,2,undef,4];
my $b = bencode($x);
warn $b;

my $c = bdecode($b);
warn Dumper($c);

warnings are generated and the result appears to be invalid Bencode.

Use of uninitialized value $data in pattern match (m//) at /home/mark/src/bif/.direnv/perl5/lib/perl5/Bencode.pm line 120.
Use of uninitialized value $data in concatenation (.) or string at /home/mark/src/bif/.direnv/perl5/lib/perl5/Bencode.pm line 121.
Use of uninitialized value $data in concatenation (.) or string at /home/mark/src/bif/.direnv/perl5/lib/perl5/Bencode.pm line 121.
li1ei2e:i4ee at x.pl line 11.
garbage at 7 at x.pl line 13.

I am aware that the original format doesn't cover undefined values, so you probably don't want to support round-tripping of 'undef'. But I would suggest either croaking or encoding a zero-length string in place of the undef (configurable by an option?) to be better than invalid output.

Fails tests with Carp 1.24 or lower

As per subject. Sample fail report: http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/87505520

Analysis: http://analysis.cpantesters.org/reports_by_field?SUBMIT_xxx=Submit&distv=Bencode-1.500&field=mod%3ACarp

Cap 1.25 introduced the dot at the end of the message. So either Carp 1.25 is a requirement or the test needs to be rewritten as a like().

Best,