Description

cl-bencode is a Common Lisp bencode library. Bencode is the encoding used by BitTorrent.

Features

cl-bencode supports all four different types of bencode values.

• byte strings as strings or byte vectors
• integers as integers
• lists as lists
• and dictionaries as hashtables

It's proven capable of roundtripping several torrents found in the wild.

String encoding

The bencode specification does not deal with character encodings. cl-bencode uses flexi-streams' external-formats for character encoding. The default is UTF-8. See http://weitz.de/flexi-streams/#external-formats

Binary strings

The parameter *binary-key-p* may hold a function. When decoding dictionary values, this function is passed a list, where the first element is the key of the value. If the dictionary was in turn a dictionary value, that key is the second element of the list, and so on. Should a dictionary be a value in a bencoded list, the corresponding element in the list will be the symbol :list. When the function return a true value, the dictionary value will be binary. Otherwise it will be decoded as a string.

The default function in *binary-key-p* returns true for the "pieces" value in the "info" dictionary. All other values are decoded as strings.

Example

CL-USER> (ql:quickload "bencode")
; ...
("bencode")
CL-USER> (with-open-file (stream "/tmp/torrent" 
                                 :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))
           (bencode:decode stream))
#<HASH-TABLE :TEST EQUAL :COUNT 4 {1005E0E3D3}>
CL-USER> (gethash "announce" *)
"http://bttracker.debian.org:6969/announce"
T
CL-USER> (type-of (gethash "pieces" (gethash "info" **)))
(SIMPLE-ARRAY (UNSIGNED-BYTE 8) (88860))
CL-USER> (equalp (ironclad:digest-sequence :sha1 (bencode:encode *** nil))
                 (ironclad:digest-file :sha1 "/tmp/torrent"))
T
CL-USER> (asdf:test-system "bencode")
......................................
T
CL-USER> 

Todo

• Documentation