Hi Sandy, wt., 6 lut 2024 o 21:19 Sanford Whiteman <figureone...@gmail.com> napisał(a):
> Howdy all, haven't posted in ages but good to see the list going strong. > > I'd like a little background on something we've long accepted: why > does the serialization format need double quotes around a string, even > though the byte length is explicit? > > Example: > > s:5:"hello"; > > All else being equal I would think we could have just > > s:5:hello; > > and skip forward 5 bytes. Instead we need to be aware of the leading > and trailing " in our state machine but I'm not sure what the > advantage is. > You inspired me to play with serialization format to spot even more unnecessary chars https://3v4l.org/DLh1U >From my PoV there are more candidates to reduce and still keep the safety, for eg: removing leading ':' before array/object and trailing ';' inside brackets, you reduce by 2 bytes a:4:{i:0;i:123;i:1;b:1;i:2;d:1.1;i:3;s:3:"baz";} Could be simply a:4{i:0;i:123;i:1;b:1;i:2;d:1.1;i:3;s:3:baz} This example saves 4 bytes: double-quotes, one ; and : If you go further all types that require size/length also don't need extra double-colon meaning: a:4 could become a4 s:3 could become s3 The same could apply to O: and E: O3:Foo:5{s4:date;O17:DateTimeImmutable:3{s4:date;s26:2024-02-08 08:41:10.009742;s13:timezone_type;i:3;s8:timezone;s16:Europe/Amsterdam}s6:*foo;s11:Foo bar baz;s8:Foobar;i:123456789;s3:tbl;a4{i:0;i:123;i:1;b:1;i:2;d:1.1;i:3;s3:baz}s8:*color;E12:Color:Yellow} This is still readable by humans and keep the size/length in all places where needed. My attached example is poor but shows up to ~20% size reduction. Interestingly when an array is serialized as object property it is not followed by ; in field list https://3v4l.org/4p6ve O:3:"Foo":2:{s:3:"foo";a:3:{i:0;i:1;i:1;i:2;i:2;i:3;}s:3:"bar";s:3:"baz";} Missing ; between }s was a surprise to me. Best regards, Michał Marcin Brzuchalski
