NAME
    Convert::Bencode - Functions for converting to/from bencoded strings

SYNOPSIS
      use Convert::Bencode qw(bencode bdecode);

      my $string = "d4:ainti12345e3:key5:value4:type4:teste";
      my $hashref = bdecode($string);

      foreach my $key (keys(%{$hashref})) {
          print "Key: $key, Value: ${$hashref}{$key}\n";
      }

      my $encoded_string = bencode($hashref);
      print $encoded_string."\n";

DESCRIPTION
    This module provides two functions, "bencode" and "bdecode", which
    encode and decode bencoded strings respectivly.

  Encoding
    "bencode()" expects to be passed a single value, which is either a
    scalar, a arrary ref, or a hash ref, and it returns a scalar containing
    the bencoded representation of the data structure it was passed. If the
    value passed was a scalar, it returns either a bencoded string, or a
    bencoded integer (floating points are not implemented, and would be
    returned as a string rather than a integer). If the value was a array
    ref, it returns a bencoded list, with all the values of that array also
    bencoded recursivly. If the value was a hash ref, it returns a bencoded
    dictionary (which for all intents and purposes can be thought of as a
    synonym for hash) containing the recursivly bencoded key and value pairs
    of the hash.

  Decoding
    "bdecode()" expects to be passed a single scalar containing the bencoded
    string to be decoded. Its return value will be either a hash ref, a
    array ref, or a scalar, depending on whether the outer most element of
    the bencoded string was a dictionary, list, or a string/integer
    respectivly.

SEE ALSO
    The description of bencode is part of the bittorrent protocol
    specification which can be found at
    http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/protocol.html

BUGS
    No error detection of bencoded data. Damaged input will most likely
    cause very bad things to happen, up to and including causeing the
    bdecode function to recurse infintly.

AUTHOR & COPYRIGHT
    Created by R. Kyle Murphy <orclev@rejectedmaterial.com>, aka Orclev.

    Copyright 2003 R. Kyle Murphy. All rights reserved. Convert::Bencode is
    free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
    terms as Perl itself.

