How to handle unused tokens while decoding?
0ndorio opened this issue · 1 comments
The port of additional test cases (#20) to fix issue #7 revealed a new question. The original test suite contained some cases marked as "illegal" which contain more tokens than actually required to restore the expected data type. Example: Decoding i12345e5:hello
into an integer.
How should FromBencode
handle the case? Potential solutions I can think of:
- silently drop them (as we do right now)
- return an error variant which contains the unused tokens
- add an additional default implementation next to
from_bencode
with stricter handling
I think the best solution is something like the last one, but we make from_bencode
return a Result<(Self, &[u8]), Error>
(where the &[u8]
is what's left in the input string), and then have a from_bencode_complete
that converts the case where there's something left into an error
I'm not firm on the naming; I'd also be OK with from_bencode_partial
and from_bencode
for the current behaviour and the new behaviour, respectively