Binary Strings

Lua strings are raw byte sequences — they have no inherent encoding. Game addons like Questie use this to store compact binary data (packed coordinates, pointer maps, serialized databases) directly inside Lua string values.

When the game client writes SavedVariables to disk, these binary bytes are written verbatim between quotes. This means a .lua file can contain strings with arbitrary non-ASCII bytes that aren't valid UTF-8.

luadata handles this with a per-string heuristic: if a string's bytes are valid UTF-8, it decodes them as UTF-8 (so accented player names like "Fröst" render correctly). If the bytes contain any invalid UTF-8 sequences, each byte is mapped to its Latin-1 code point, preserving every byte losslessly.

playerName = "Fröst"
binaryData = "packed data here"

{
  "playerName": "Fröst",
  "binaryData": "packed data here"
}

In the example above, both strings are valid UTF-8 so they decode normally. In real addon data, a binary string might look like this in JSON:

"objPtrs": "\u0002\u009e\u00c4\u00b6\u0002"

Each \uXXXX escape represents one original byte. A consumer can recover the raw bytes by reading each character's code point as a byte value:

python raw_bytes = bytes(ord(c) for c in json_value)

javascript const rawBytes = [...jsonValue].map(c => c.codePointAt(0));

go rawBytes := []byte(jsonValue)

This design means:

• Text strings (player names, item names) render correctly as UTF-8 everywhere — in browsers, databases, and APIs.
• Binary strings (packed data, serialized blobs) are preserved losslessly. Every original byte can be recovered from the JSON output.
• The distinction is automatic — no configuration or hints needed.

For more control over binary encoding, a JSON Schema can declare specific fields as format: "base64" or format: "bytes" — see Schema String Formats.