mar@MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein) (08/17/90)
Athena's hesiod library is layered on top of BIND and uses TXT records. When adding proper TXT support to BIND, I was initially confused by that part of the RFC. Multiple strings are necessary if a TXT field of more than 255 bytes is to be included. This is because the length field of an encoded string is only 1 byte, limiting the length to 255 bytes. The way I implemented it, as long as the parser hasn't reached the end of the resource record (whose total length is included in the packet), keep reading out additional strings and concatenate their contents. In the master file, these are just put in doublequotes, with no indication of how a long string is broken down into a series of strings in the packet. -Mark