saur0n / libserialization

Effective simple C++ serialization library

libserialization

This library allows to serialize standard C++ data types to binary form.

Supported data types

Serialization and deserialization of the following data types is supported:

• bool
• char
• int8_t
• uint8_t
• int16_t
• uint16_t
• int32_t
• uint32_t
• int64_t
• uint64_t
• long long (not the same as int64_t)
• unsigned long long (not the same as uint64_t)
• std::array
• std::basic_string
• std::map
• std::pair
• std::set
• std::vector

Serialization of the following data types is supported:

• fixed-size arrays
• const char * (C-strings)
• any classes that have serialize() method (see below)

Deserialization of the following data types is supported:

• any custom classes which have deserialization constructor (see below)

Serialization and deserialization of float, double and long double are implemented, but data format will be changed in future.

Usage

The following include statement is necessary:

#include <rohan/Serializer.hpp>

Optional using directives:

using rohan::InputStream;
using rohan::OutputStream;

Writing data

Data is written using the | operator:

const unsigned magic=0x4698CD67;
std::vector<std::string> vec {"alpha", "beta", "gamma"};
writer | magic | vec | "string";

To write fields of a class, add constant method serialize():

class Color {
public:
    explicit Color(uint8_t r, uint8_t g, uint8_t b) : r(r), g(g), b(b) {}
    void serialize(Writer &writer) const {
        writer | r | g | b;
    }
private:
    uint8_t r, g, b;
};

Reading data

Data is read from the stream using type conversion operator:

unsigned nCows=unsigned(reader);
std::vector<std::string> vec=std::vector<std::string>(reader);

To read fields of a class, create a unserialization constructor:

class Color {
public:
    explicit Color(Reader &reader) :
        r(uint8_t(reader)),
        g(uint8_t(reader)),
        b(uint8_t(reader)) {}
private:
    uint8_t r, g, b;
};