[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="joey"
 subject="""re: Stream encoding"""
 date="2015-09-09T20:44:38Z"
 content="""
@sjvdwalt, git-annex does not specify or expect any character encoding to be used
for this protocol. A robust external special remote shouldn't assume any
particular character encoding, either.

Lines will be terminated with '\n' (0xA), and words in lines are
delimited by an ascii space (0x20). The keywords in the protocol are ascii
too of course. Any values can contain an arbitrary sequence of bytes that may
or may not be able to be decoded using the current character encoding.

IIRC, character encodings like UTF8 that encode a character to multiple
bytes avoid ever using 0x0 to 0xFF when doing so. So, every ascii space and
newline are unambiguously such, and it's safe to split on them even though
no encoding is specified.
"""]]