Netstrings (1997)

4 comments

• Joker_vD 20 minutes ago

      if (scanf("%9lu",&len) < 1) barf();  /* >999999999 bytes is bad */
      if (getchar() != ':') barf();
      buf = malloc(len + 1);       /* malloc(0) is not portable */
      if (!buf) barf();
      if (fread(buf,1,len,stdin) < len) barf();
      if (getchar() != ',') barf();
  

  Ah, the wonders of error-handling in C. Also, I wonder what's wrong with

      buf = malloc(len ? len : 1);
• regularfry 2 hours ago
  Tagged Netstrings (tnetstrings) was a related proposal from 15 years ago or so. It replaces the comma with a single-character type definition so you can do JSON-like objects with a couple of recursive types: you had ',', '#', '^', '!', and '~' for strings, integers, floats, booleans, and nulls, then ']' and '}' for lists and dictionaries.

  Most of the links have bitrotted and I don't think it ever got much traction, but I did always like how simple it was. There's a copy someone grabbed of the original spec here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ged/tnetstrings.info/refs/...

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  • bmacho 1 hour ago
    Here's a HTML viewer (not mine; use it at your own risk): <https://html-preview.github.io/?url=https://raw.githubuserco...>
• ocrow 3 hours ago
  Seems like a coherent, sensible proposal, as one might expect from djb. Any notable protocols use them?
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  • Scaevolus 3 hours ago
    BitTorrent's bencoding format, used in .torrent files, effectively uses netstrings-- but without the trailing commas, so it uses "5:hello" to represent filenames and similar.
  • asalahli 1 hour ago
    Not sure if it counts as notable, but SCGI uses it too: https://python.ca/scgi/protocol.txt
  • toast0 2 hours ago
    Php serialized uses

       s:size:value;
    

    For strings, which is pretty similar. Size is in bytes.
• gnabgib 3 hours ago
  (1997) -DJB