[Xapian-discuss] Re: Xapian-discuss Digest, Vol 35, Issue 9

[James Aylett]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 02:37:31PM -0700, Mark Blythe wrote:

> I wouldn't go so far as to write a full parser either, but there are plenty
> of pre-existing packages for serializing/deserializing data structures.  You
> shouldn't have to re-invent the wheel.  If you want to go with a delimited
> string and can't think of any printable character that you can guarantee
> won't be in the data, you can always choose a non-printable delimiter, like
> a chr(0) or chr(7).  If you want to store key/value pairs but don't trust
> eval Data::Dumper, use JSON.  It's eval-safe and language-independent.

I'd generally recommend JSON in most cases, particularly for getting
started. It has great support across a very wide range of languages,
and can transport more conveniently than XML (particularly, NULs).

(Note: I'd never recommend eval() unless there's no alternative. With
JSON, there is :-)

J

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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org