title: Thrift string type encoding
body: <p>Thrift strings are said to be <a href="http://diwakergupta.github.io/thrift-missing-guide/" rel="nofollow">encoding agnostic / binary strings</a>. What exactly does this mean? Does Thrift use its own encoding in between processing by programming languages?</p>
  
  <p>What's a binary string?</p>
  
  <p>I understand ASCII char arrays (= strings in C-based languages), and Unicode byte sequences, but I'm not quite sure how to interpret "encoding agnostic or binary strings" in the context of Thrift.</p>