> give me a binary protocol to parse any time
I don't disagree in principle but I've come across a handful of very poorly documentated binary protocols in my years and that is an extremely painful thing to deal with compared to text-based protocols.
I don't disagree in principle but I've come across a handful of very poorly documentated binary protocols in my years and that is an extremely painful thing to deal with compared to text-based protocols.
GET /asdfasdfasdfdsaf
X-Asdf-Asdf: 83e7234
HTTP/1.0 202
X-83e7233: 1
X-83f730b: 4
Overall, I think it's kind of a wash. It's basically equally easy to take a documented text or binary protocol and write a working parser. Neither format solves any intrinsic problems -- malicious input has to be accounted for, you have to write fuzz tests, you have to deal with broken producers. It's a wash.
People like text because they can type it into telnet and see something work, which is kind of cool, but probably not a productive use of time. I can type HTTP messages, but use curl anyway. (SMTP was always my favorite. "HELO there / MAIL FROM foo / RCPT TO bar / email body / ." Felt like a real conversation going on. Still not sure how to send an email that consists of a single dot on its own line though.)
A line starting with a period is escaped by adding an extra period; the receiving side removes the first character of a line if it is a period.
It seems you prefix any line of data starting with a period with an additional period, to therefore distinguish it from the end of mail period.