ethers.js/docs.wrm/basics/abi.wrm

_section: Application Binary Interfaces  @<docs-abi>

When interacting with any application, whether it is on Ethereum,
over the internet or within a compiled application on a computer
all information is stored and sent as binary data which is just a
sequence of bytes.

So every application must agree on how to encode and decode their
information as a sequence of bytes.

An **Application Binary Interface** (ABI) provides a way to describe
the encoding and decoding process, in a generic way so that a variety
of types and structures of types can be defined.

For example, a string is often encoded as a UTF-8 sequence of bytes,
which uses specific bits within sub-sequences to indicate emoji and
other special characters. Every implementation of UTF-8 must understand
and operate under the same rules so that strings work universally. In
this way, UTF-8 standard is itself an ABI.

When interacting with Ethereum, a contract received a sequence of bytes
as input (provided by sending a transaction or through a call) and
returns a result as a sequence of bytes. So, each Contract has its own
ABI that helps specify how to encode the input and how to decode the output.

It is up to the contract developer to make this ABI available. Many
Contracts implement a standard (such as ERC-20), in which case the
ABI for that standard can be used. Many developers choose to verify their
source code on Etherscan, in which case Etherscan computes the ABI and
provides it through their website (which can be fetched using the ``getContract``
method). Otherwise, beyond reverse engineering the Contract there is
not a meaningful way to extract the contract ABI.

_subsection: Call Data Representation

When calling a Contract on Ethereum, the input data must be encoded
according to the ABI.

The first 4 bytes of the data are the **method selector**, which is
the keccak256 hash of the normalized method signature.

Then the method parameters are encoded and concatenated to the selector.

All encoded data is made up of components padded to 32 bytes, so the length
of input data will always be congruent to ``4 mod 32``.

The result of a successful call will be encoded values, whose components
are padded to 32 bytes each as well, so the length of a result will always
be congruent to ``0 mod 32``, on success.

The result of a reverted call will contain the **error selector** as the
first 4 bytes, which is the keccak256 of the normalized error signature,
followed by the encoded values, whose components are padded to 32 bytes
each, so the length of a revert will be congruent to ``4 mod 32``.

The one exception to all this is that ``revert(false)`` will return a
result or ``0x``.


_subsection: Event Data Representation

When an Event is emitted from a contract, there are two places data is
logged in a Log: the **topics** and the **data**.

An additonal fee is paid for each **topic**, but this affords a topic
to be indexed in a bloom filter within the block, which allows efficient
filtering.

The **topic hash** is always the first topic in a Log, which is the
keccak256 of the normalized event signature. This allows a specific
event to be efficiently filtered, finding the matching events in a block.

Each additional **indexed** parameter (i.e. parameters marked with
``indexed`` in the signautre) are placed in the topics as well, but may be
filtered to find matching values.

All non-indexed parameters are encoded and placed in the **data**. This
is cheaper and more compact, but does not allow filtering on these values.

For example, the event ``Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint value)``
would require 3 topics, which are the topic hash, the ``from`` address
and the ``to`` address and the data would contain 32 bytes, which is
the padded big-endian representation of ``value``. This allows for
efficient filtering by the event (i.e. ``Transfer``) as well as the ``from``
address and ``to`` address.


_subsection: Deployment

When deploying a transaction, the data provided is treated as **initcode**,
which executes the data as normal EVM bytecode, which returns a sequence
of bytes, but instead of that sequence of bytes being treated as data that
result is instead the bytecode to install as the bytecode of the contract.

The bytecode produced by Solidity is designed to have all constructor
parameters encoded normally and concatenated to the bytecode and provided
as the ``data`` to a transaction with no ``to`` address.