eaton / serializers

Consistent wrapper interfaces for parsing and stringifying a variety of formats.

Eaton's quick and dirty serializers

A set of handy-if-janky helpers for parsing and stringifying data I run into when spelunking through old archives and/or database snapshots.

Caveats

None of these serializers are meant to be used with large quantities of data. Fire a few hundred megs of data at any one of them, and things are likely to get unpleasant. For anything significant you're much better off picking a format and package from scracth, and probably using a streaming parser or something.

…But, when you've just got a bundle of files in a particular format and you want to rifle through that data in a hurry? It can be a lifesaver. That's what I use it for, and that's why it's here.

The Rogues' Gallery

• base64 is silly simple, but served as a nice demo while I was testing FS-Jetpack integration.
• csv and tsv, via csv-parse and csv-stringify. They're configured to assume header columns exist, parse the records to an array of objects, and be forgiving of missing/extra columns from line to line.
• ejson, a JSON variant used by MongoDB that can roundtrip dates, regexes, and buffers, via the ejson project.
• frontmatter in markdown files, in either JSON or YAML format, via the grey-matter project.
• ini, the old reliable, via the ini project.
• json, json5, and nsjson, via the json5 project.
• php. Yeah, various PHP-based CMSs like Wordpress and Drupal have a tendency to jam internal configuration data into DB tables using PHP's serialize/deserialize functions. The code to decihper these little bundles of joy descends from php-js; I updated it with additional type-checking typing and error handling.
• plist, the XML doctype Apple uses to store tons of MacOS config files, via the plist project.
• toml, GitHub founder Tom Preston-Warner's personal config file language, via the @iarna/toml project.
• yaml, the venerable config storage format that shows up everywhere, via the yaml project.

Using them with FS Jetpack

Most of these are exposed as parse/stringify pairs that can be passed into my fork of fs-jetpack, where they'll transparently do their thing when reading and writing files with a specified extension. Again, this is absolutely not the most efficient way to handle large piles of data, but for small to middlin' ones it's extremely handy.

import jetpack from '@eatonfyi/fs-jetpack';
import { Yaml } from '@eatonfyi/serializers;

jetpack.setSerializer('.yaml', new Yaml());

const config = jetpack.read('./my-config.yaml', 'auto');

console.log(config); // Actual parsed data, not the raw string. Yay.