Bencode (pronounced like Bee-encode) is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured data. It supports four different types of values: * byte strings, * integers, * lists, and * dictionaries (associative arrays). Bencoding is most commonly used in torrent files, and as such is part of the BitTorrent specification. These metadata files are simply bencoded dictionaries.