bencode can't unmarshal nested dictionaries? about taipei-torrent

[nictuku]

To clarify, the Decode function does fill the outmost dictionary fields, but not the inner one.

Also, encoding that object works - just decoding won't work.

[jackpal]

Hey, sorry to cause you trouble.

If the torrent protocol doesn't require decoding dictionaries inside of dictionaries, I guess that explains why this bug hasn't been found.

As for how to fix it -- it may be a case where an object is being passed by reference rather than by pointer. So we may be successfully decoding the inner dictionary, but then throwing away that copy rather than saving it in the outer dictionary.

That is a wild guess, but I've had similar bugs in the past. It is error-prone that interface{} works for both references and pointers.

[nictuku]

Hey, thanks for the reply.

This is required for DHT. See the sample queries in http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html.

I'll take a shot at this later, and also try to fix a few panics conditions that I managed to generate when doing incorrect calls (e.g: when I inappropriately passed map[string]string{} for a decoding that demanded map[string]interface{}, IIRC).

Another question, would it be too ugly for me to add a safety measure in the bencode library, so it catches all panics before it goes up the stack, so we can show an error instead? That is, only to provide a safety net for really exceptional cases, assuming we can't avoid all panic occurrences in the first place.

[nictuku]

Problem solved. User error, of course. Dictionary inside dictionaries work, I was just doing the wrong thing.

commit b9b781b on my repository adds a unit test for it.