Merge pull request #4773 from ethereum/chriseth-patch-1

Clarify packed encoding.

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/docs/abi-spec.rst b/docs/abi-spec.rst
index ec84d123..be645b5c 100644
--- a/docs/abi-spec.rst
+++ b/docs/abi-spec.rst
@@ -565,14 +565,13 @@ Non-standard Packed Mode
 
 Through ``abi.encodePacked()``, Solidity supports a non-standard packed mode where:
 
-- no :ref:`function selector <abi_function_selector>` is encoded,
 - types shorter than 32 bytes are neither zero padded nor sign extended and
 - dynamic types are encoded in-place and without the length.
 
-As an example encoding ``int1, bytes1, uint16, string`` with values ``-1, 0x42, 0x2424, "Hello, world!"`` results in ::
+As an example encoding ``int8, bytes1, uint16, string`` with values ``-1, 0x42, 0x2424, "Hello, world!"`` results in ::
 
     0xff42242448656c6c6f2c20776f726c6421
-      ^^                                 int1(-1)
+      ^^                                 int8(-1)
         ^^                               bytes1(0x42)
           ^^^^                           uint16(0x2424)
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ string("Hello, world!") without a length field
@@ -582,8 +581,7 @@ and dynamically-sized types like ``string``, ``bytes`` or ``uint[]`` are encoded
 their length field. This means that the encoding is ambiguous as soon as there are two
 dynamically-sized elements.
 
-Note that constants will be packed using the minimum number of bytes required to store them.
-This means that, for example, ``abi.encodePacked(0) == abi.encodePacked(uint8(0)) == hex"00"`` and
-``abi.encodePacked(0x12345678) == abi.encodePacked(uint32(0x12345678)) == hex"12345678"``.
-
 If padding is needed, explicit type conversions can be used: ``abi.encodePacked(uint16(0x12)) == hex"0012"``.
+
+Since packed encoding is not used when calling functions, there is no special support
+for prepending a function selector.