I have create a google code project for my Python netstring module.
So what is a netstring? A netstring is a way of encoding strings of data in a file or network stream. The classic way of doing this is to terminate the string with a special character, such as carriage return, line-feed or a null byte. But this means that when reading the encoded data you have to check every character in the stream to see if it is the terminator character -- which can be inefficient. It also makes it impossible to encode a string that contains the terminator character, because it will be incorrectly interpreted as the end of the string. Netstrings solve both these problems by encoding the size of the string up-front. continue reading…