What is the encode and decode string pattern?

The encode and decode pattern converts a list of strings into a single string and back without ambiguity. The standard approach prepends each string with its length followed by a delimiter, so "hello" and "world" become "5#hello5#world." Decoding reads the length number, skips the delimiter, extracts that many characters, and repeats. This handles edge cases like empty strings, strings containing the delimiter, and strings with special characters because the length prefix tells the decoder exactly how many characters to read.