# RLP

let's look at the Appendix B of YP, it describes internals of RLP (Recursive length prefix).

This is a encoding scheme, that is employed at Eth1.0, although many encoding's exist like JSON, YAML, BSON, XML etc...Encoding's can be classified into binary and non-binary formats

> * Recursive Length Prefix (RLP) encoding.

> * The purpose of RLP is to encode arbitrarily nested arrays of binary data, and
> * RLP is the main encoding method used to serialize objects in Ethereum. The
> * only purpose of RLP is to encode structure; encoding specific atomic data
> * types (eg. strings, integers, floats) is left up to higher-order protocols; in
> * Ethereum the standard is that integers are represented in big endian binary
> * form. If one wishes to use RLP to encode a dictionary, the two suggested
> * canonical forms are to either use [[k1,v1],[k2,v2]...] with keys in
> * lexicographic order or to use the higher-level Patricia Tree encoding as
> * Ethereum does.
> * The RLP encoding function takes in an item. An item is defined as follows:
> * - A string (ie. byte array) is an item - A list of items is an item
> * For example, an empty string is an item, as is the string containing the word
> * "cat", a list containing any number of strings, as well as more complex data
> * structures like ["cat",["puppy","cow"],"horse",[[]],"pig",[""],"sheep"]. Note
> * that in the context of the rest of this article, "string" will be used as a
> * synonym for "a certain number of bytes of binary data"; no special encodings
> * are used and no knowledge about the content of the strings is implied.
> * <p>
> * See: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-RLP
> *
>