To be clear, I think a character count isn't what you want. That's easy enough to do post-parse. A byte count is most useful so that can make a single call to p

To be clear, I think a character count isn't what you want. That's easy enough to do post-parse. A byte count is most useful so that can make a single call to pull the value into memory. A buddy and I wrote python bindings for Hessian and the fact they were encoding character counts and not byte count caused us pain. Makes sense regarding pointers within messages, and interfaces.