Browsing Inuktitut translation

5.

The banana protocol is a stream of data composed of elements. Each element has the following general structure - first, the length of element encoded in base-128, least signficant bit first. For example length 4674 will be sent as <code>0x42 0x24</code>. For certain element types the length will be omitted (e.g. float) or have a different meaning (it is the actual value of integer elements).

6.

Following the length is a delimiter byte, which tells us what kind of element this is. Depending on the element type, there will then follow the number of bytes specified in the length. The byte's high-bit will always be set, so that we can differentiate between it and the length (since the length bytes use 128-base, their high bit will never be set).

7.

Element Types

8.

Given a series of bytes that gave us length N, these are the different delimiter bytes:

9.

List -- 0x80

10.

The following bytes are a list of N elements. Lists may be nested, and a child list counts as only one element to its parent (regardless of how many elements the child list contains).

11.

Integer -- 0x81

12.

The value of this element is the positive integer N. Following bytes are not part of this element. Integers can have values of 0 &lt;= N &lt;= 2147483647.

13.

String -- 0x82

14.

The following N bytes are a string element.