Comments on: BEncoding Obj-C Class

By: onlyone0001

onlyone0001 — Sat, 01 May 2010 23:44:01 +0000

The download link is not working.

By: porneL

porneL — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:36:40 +0000

I’ve created Spotlight metadata importer based on your code. Few issues:

• I’ve changed code to use autoreleased objects. You shoud use init/new/copy naming scheme for methods that return retained objects.
• It didn’t handle corrupted files gracefully. I’ve had to add bounds checks everywhere (probably still isn’t 100% correct).
• GPL v3 is very limiting for such software. Consider LGPL v2 or BSD license.

By: Objective-C BEncoding Framework – Glass Echidna

Objective-C BEncoding Framework – Glass Echidna — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:14:15 +0000

[...] Objective-C implementation provides a nice high-level library of methods (in reality, only two are needed!), but has a few [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:54:39 +0000

According to the specification (BEP3) the keys in a dictionary should always be sorted (as raw strings). So the order of the keys in a dictionary is fixed, and this shouldn’t give any issues when encoding a dictionary again later.

By: chrome

chrome — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:43:59 +0000

I havn’t had time to actually use my class in a practical application, so your comments are useful. I’ll have a think about it and post an update when I have time.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:39:18 +0000

Just wanted to say thanks for writing this class and posting the source code. As someone who's just gotten started on ObjC and Cocoa programming, I found it a very useful class for viewing bencoded data from torrents I had downloaded. I did find two limitations that users of this class might find useful to know about in advance:

Sometimes bencoded dictionaries have binary keys - for example, if you query a tracker about a torrent (you would do this to find out how many seeds and leachers the torrent had), the reply you get includes a dictionary where a binary key (info_hash) is used to identify the torrent. Since the class codes dictionary keys as NSStrings, such dictionaries can't be parsed by the class.
I found it difficult to use the class when I wanted to calculate the info_hash for a torrent file. The class returns dictionaries as NSDictionaries, so as far as I am aware, there is no way to determine the order in which the keys in the dictionary were encoded. But this is important when calculating a hash. This is something which I imagine a reasonable proportion of people interested in bencoding might want to do.