Comment by 56quarters

The Redis protocol uses length prefixes for bulk strings and arrays (per your linked document). That enables it to read multiple bytes at a time off the socket, though it does seem like you'll still end up doing a bit of character by character processing with the result.

  RESP uses prefixed lengths to transfer bulk data, so there is never a need to scan the payload for special characters like it happens for instance with JSON, nor to quote the payload that needs to be sent to the server.

  The Bulk and Multi Bulk lengths can be processed with code that performs a single operation per character while at the same time scanning for the CR character, like the following C code: