rurban / concise-encoding

General purpose, compact representations of semi-structured hierarchical data, in binary and text formats.

Concise Binary Encoding and Concise Text Encoding

General purpose, compact representations of semi-structured hierarchical data, in binary and text formats.

Alternative To:

• JSON
• XML
• BSON
• CBOR
• MessagePack
• Protobuf

Goals

• General purpose encoding for a large number of applications
• Supports the most common data types
• Supports hierarchical data structuring
• Minimal complexity
• Type compatibility between CBE and CTE

Goals: Concise Binary Encoding (CBE):

• Binary format to minimize parsing costs
• Little endian byte ordering to allow the most common systems to read directly off the wire
• Balanced space and computation efficiency

Goals: Concise Text Encoding (CTE):

• Human readable format

Supported Types

Scalar Types

Type	Description
Boolean	True or false
Integer	Signed two's complement, from 8 to 128 bits
Float	IEEE 754 floating point, from 32 to 128 bits
Decimal	IEEE 754 densely packed decimal, from 32 to 128 bits
Time	Date & time, to the microsecond or nanosecond

Array Types

Type	Description
Bytes	Array of binary data
String	Array of UTF-8 encoded bytes
URI	Universal Resource Identifier
Comment	A UTF-8 encoded comment string

Container Types

Containers can hold any combination of types, including other containers.

Type	Description
List	A list may containin any types, even mixed
Map	Scalar or array types for keys, any types for values

Other Types

Type	Description
Nil	Denotes the absence of data
Padding	Used to align data in a CPU friendly manner (CBE Only)

Specifications

• Concise Binary Encoding
• Concise Text Encoding

Implementations

• C implementation
• Go implementation

License

Specifications released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Reference implementation released under MIT License.