[comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains] TXT resource records

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