ABNF Specification of Netstrings Version 1 2003-July-02 Dwayne C. Litzenberger http://www.dlitz.net/proto/netstrings-abnf.txt 1. History and Purpose The netstring encoding was created by D. J. Bernstein , and is officially defined in . For completeness, the NETSTRING type is specified here in Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF is defined in RFC 2234). 2. Specification NETSTRING = length ":" data "," length = 1*DIGIT ; length of the string, in decimal data = *OCTET ; the string data itself 3. Examples The following are netstrings: example1 = "12:Hello world!," example2 = "3:foo," example3 = "43:There is a NUL between the parentheses: (" %x00 ")," example4 = "0:," 4. Distribution Distribution of this memo is unlimited.