[Python-bugs-list] [ python-Bugs-467384 ] provide a documented serialization func (original) (raw)

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Thu, 11 Oct 2001 22:12:58 -0700

Bugs item #467384, was opened at 2001-10-02 19:25 You can respond by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=467384&group_id=5470

Category: None Group: Feature Request Status: Open Resolution: None Priority: 5 Submitted By: paul rubin (phr) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: provide a documented serialization func

Initial Comment: It would be nice if there was a documented library function for serializing Python basic objects (numbers, strings, dictionaries, and lists). By documented I mean the protocol is specified in the documentation, precisely enough to write interoperating implementations in other languages.

Code-wise, the marshal.dumps and loads functions do what I want, but their data format is (according to the documentation) intentionally not specified, because the format might change in future Python versions. Maybe that doc was written long enough ago that it's ok to freeze the marshal format now, and document it? I just mean for the basic types listed above. Stuff like code objects don't have to be specified. In fact it would be nice if there was a flag to the loads and dumps functions to refuse to marshal/ unmarshal those objects.

Pickle/cpickle aren't really appropriate for what I'm asking, since they're complicated (they try to handle class instances, circular structure, etc.) and anyway they're not documented either.

The XDR library is sort of ok, but it's written in Python (i.e. slow) and it doesn't automatically handle compound objects.

Thanks

Comment By: paul rubin (phr) Date: 2001-10-11 22:12

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I haven't looked at xmlrpclib, but I'm looking for a simple, compact, binary representation, not something that needs a complicated parser and expands the data by an order of magnitude.

Comment By: Martin v. L�wis (loewis) Date: 2001-10-05 17:10

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So what's wrong with xmlrpclib?

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