tnetstring is a data serialization library. It's a lot like JSON but it uses a new syntax called "typed netstrings" that Zed has proposed for use in the Mongrel2 webserver. It's designed to be simpler and easier to implement than JSON, with a happy consequence of also being faster in many cases.
An ordinary netstring is a blob of data prefixed with its length and postfixed with a sanity-checking comma. The string "hello world" encodes like this:
11:hello world,
Typed netstrings add other datatypes by replacing the comma with a type tag. Here's the integer 12345 encoded as a tnetstring:
5:12345#
And here's the list [12345,True,0] which mixes integers and bools:
19:5:12345#4:true!1:0#]
Simple enough? This module gives you the following functions:
dump: dump an object as a tnetstring to a file
dumps: dump an object as a tnetstring to a string
load: load a tnetstring-encoded object from a file
loads: load a tnetstring-encoded object from a string
pop: pop a tnetstring-encoded object from the front of a string
Note that since parsing a tnetstring requires reading all the data into memory at once, there's no efficiency gain from using the file-based versions of these functions. They're only here so you can use load() to read precisely one item from a file or socket without consuming any extra data.
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· Python
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