request_id variable, needs more documentation

[gabor.farkas@…]

i'd like to use request_id, but there are several things i need to know about it before i can use it, and the documentation does not answer them:

1. is that raw bytes? or a hexadecimal number as a string?
2. how long (how many characters) is it?

i need to know these because for example, maybe i want to put it into a query-string, or a html-attribute... so i need to know if i have to base64-encode it manually, or that's not needed, and so on.

i think the documentation should tell us more about this variable. i understand i can look into the source code to see how it is generated, but that does not guarantee that it will not change with the next version.