Background

Recently, I've been working on a web application to manage recipes that my partner and I have collected. The application provides forms to enter the recipe metadata as well as the ingredients that comprise the recipe.

To ease the process of copying recipes into system, I started to investigate whether it would be possible to extract the details of a recipe from the website where it is listed. This post will detail the process involved in building the functionality to import recipes, including extracting the raw data and parsing into a useable format.

Extracting recipe content

In starting the process, I wished to discover if there was a common format that recipe sites adhere to. I quickly found that to help improve the ranking of a site... Continue Reading...

Recently I decided to look further into the BitTorrent Protocol, as I have been fascinated by distributed systems (like peer-to-peer) and the communication protocols involved.

As I learnt more about how the protocol works, I thought it would be a good exercise to create a parser for the Bencode format — the format used to store and transfer metadata about a torrent file. My main goal was to create a simple program that is capable of constructing an internal representation of the Bencoded string and can output it in a nicer format (e.g. JSON).

Bencode

Bencode is a relatively straight-forward encoding which has four different types:

Byte Strings

Encoded as... Continue Reading...