Hi, I've made "serpent", a serializer based around ast.literal_eval(). You can find it on Pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/serpent
Serpent takes a Python object tree and turns it into a serialized form that can be safely read back by ast.literal_eval(). This avoids security issues that other serialization protocols such as pickle have. It also has a few other nice properties such as the readability of the serialized data. I also wrote a Java and a .NET implementation so that you can easily exchange data between the different ecosystemens. The library works with Python 2.6+ (including 3.x), IronPython 2.7, Jython 2.7, Java 1.6, .NET 3.5, or newer versions. A little bit of documentation can be found on serpent's Pypi page, including a little demo program and its output. The full source and the Java/.NET versions are not available from Pypi obviously, but a download link for them is provided in the description. 'FAQ': - Why not use XML? Answer: because XML. - Why not use JSON? Answer: because JSON is quite limited in the number of datatypes it supports, and you can't use comments in a JSON file. - Why not use pickle? Answer: because pickle has security problems. - Why not use repr()/ast.literal_eval()? See above; serpent is a superset of this and provides more convenience. Serpent provides automatic serialization mappings for some types other than the builtin primitive types. repr() can't serialize these to literals that ast.literal_eval() understands. - Why not a binary format? Answer: because binary isn't readable. - But I don't care about readability. Answer: too bad, ast.literal_eval() wants a literal string. - But I want better performance. Answer: ok, maybe you shouldn't use serpent in this case. Find an efficient binary protocol (protobuf?) - Why only Python, Java and .NET, but no bindings for insert-favorite-language-here? Answer: I don't speak that language. Maybe you could port serpent yourself? Serpent on Pypi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/serpent Cheers Irmen de Jong -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
