[dontdoxxme]

Very similar to bittorrent’s bencode. That has the benefit that it has a canonical encoding which this doesn’t (because of the different compression options). I wouldn’t be put off by how it looks as text.

[creationix]

Very true. I had forgotten about bencode, I should read up on that again.

It makes sense they need a canonical form because they want same values to have same content hashes.