Bencode (pronounced like Bee-encode) is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured data.
[1] It supports four different types of values: Bencoding is most commonly used in torrent files, and as such is part of the BitTorrent specification.
Bencoding is simple and (because numbers are encoded as text in decimal notation) is unaffected by endianness, which is important for a cross-platform application like BitTorrent.
It is also fairly flexible, as long as applications ignore unexpected dictionary keys, so that new ones can be added without creating incompatibilities.
Bencode uses ASCII characters as delimiters and digits to encode data structures in a simple and compact format.