Is there any chance we will start to see API’s become more binary-string-friendly? It would be great to be able to store compact data in DataStores and send more bits via MessagingService without needing to convert to base 64. I’m currently using this to escape the least-used byte to enable me to store binary strings in StringValues, and I don’t like it:
It’s important for the DataStore API to be robust. Back in 2015 I went with base 64 encoded strings for my game because of undocumented cases that would error.
string.format("%q", binaryString) is also pretty much unusable because it doesn’t properly escape newlines.
I don’t have a repro, but I encountered the most confusing bug a few months ago when I stored invalid utf-8 escaped strings in script source. The game would work because the module’s source was set from a script, but the moment it was opened in the script editor the source would actually change slightly and mess up my binary data. Because of this, string.format("%q", binaryString) should ideally take utf-8 into account instead of always allowing characters 128-255.
I would also request that escaped characters be made more compact: “\000\001\002\003999” → “\0\1\2\003999”. I have an entire module dedicated to formatting strings this way. +1 if it uses apostrophes when it finds there are more quotes to be escaped.