Introduction

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Meziantou.Framework.Bencode reads and writes bencode, the binary encoding that BitTorrent uses for .torrent files and for the messages of its protocols. It has two levels:

A document model for any bencode data: integers, byte strings, lists and dictionaries that you read, build and encode. See Reading bencode and Writing bencode.
A torrent model for .torrent files: the trackers, the files and the piece hashes as typed properties, and the info-hash that identifies the torrent. See Torrent files.

Bencode in short

Bencode has four kinds of values:

Kind	Encoding	Example	Type
Integer	`i<digits>e`	`i42e`	BencodeInteger
String	`<length>:<bytes>`	`4:spam`	BencodeString
List	`l<values>e`	`l4:spami42ee`	BencodeList
Dictionary	`d<key><value>…e`	`d3:cow3:mooe`	BencodeDictionary

A string is a sequence of bytes, not necessarily text: the piece hashes of a torrent are binary. Dictionary keys are strings, and the canonical encoding sorts them by their bytes, so a given dictionary always encodes to the same bytes.

Namespaces

The document model is in the Meziantou.Framework.Bencode namespace. The torrent model (TorrentFile, TorrentInfo, TorrentInfoFile, TorrentNode) is in Meziantou.Framework.Bencode.Torrent.

Next steps

Getting started: install the package, read a torrent file and decode bencode data.
Limitations: what the library does not do.