ruby-serial is a Ruby library serializing Ruby objects, optimized in many ways:
- Fast and small: use MessagePack (binary compact storage) and don't serialize twice the same object
- Independent of Ruby version: dump and load data across different versions
- Keep shared objects: if an object is shared by others, serialization still keeps the reference and does not duplicate objects in memory
- Gives the ability to fine tune which attributes of your objects are to be serialized (defaults to all)
- Keeps backward compatibility with previously serialized versions.
- Has callbacks support to fine tune the serialization process.
- Can serialize objects having reference cycles (self-contained Arrays, Hashes, objects...)
RubySerial is packaged as a simple Ruby gem:
gem install ruby-serial
Its usage is the same as Marshal library:
require 'ruby-serial'
str = RubySerial.dump [ :hello, 'World', 42 ]
# => "1\x00\x82\xA3obj\x93\x82\xA2\x00\xBB\xA2\x00\xEE\xA2\x00\xF1\xA5hello\xA5World*\xABshared_objs\x80"
RubySerial.load str
# => [:hello, "World", 42]See ruby-serial home page for more complete examples and references. Read ruby-serial documentation for a complete overview of ruby-serial features.
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