oh, sorry about that. I forgot to include the description of the format with examples.

I did add some small examples to the repo.

https://github.com/creationix/rx/blob/main/samples/quest-log...

The older, slightly outdated, design spec is in the older rex repo (this format was spun out of the rex project when I realized it's actually a good standalone format)

https://github.com/creationix/rex/blob/main/rexc-bytecode.md

'fdiscovered,aextreme,7danger,6+1A+16;6level_range,b:QThe Heap ,d'th

Oof.

Very similar to bittorrent’s bencode. That has the benefit that it has a canonical encoding which this doesn’t (because of the different compression options). I wouldn’t be put off by how it looks as text.

Very true. I had forgotten about bencode, I should read up on that again.

It makes sense they need a canonical form because they want same values to have same content hashes.

> it only has a text encoding as long as you can guarantee you don't have any unicode?

The format is technically a binary format in that length prefixes are counts of bytes. But in practice it is a textual format since you can almost always copy-paste RX values from logs to chat messages to web forms without breaking it.

unciode doesn't break anything since strings are encoded as raw unicode with utf-8 byte length prefixes. It supports unicode perfectly.

If your data only contains 7-bit ASCII strings, the entire encoding is ASCII. If your data contains unicode, RX won't escape it, so the final encoding will contain unicode as UTF-8.