Style 12 is a type of machine parseable output that many of the FICS interfaces use. The output is documented here for those who wish to write new interfaces. Style 12 is also fully compatible with ICC (The Internet Chess Club).

The data is all on one line (displayed here as two lines, so it will show on your screen). Here is an example: [Note: the beginning and ending quotation marks are not part of the data string; they are needed in this help file because some interfaces cannot display the string when in a text file.]

Bencode is a compact serialization format comparable to JSON. It is used heavily in the Bittorrent ecosystem. For most use cases, it will result in a smaller encoding than JSON.