NAME

Data::FreezeDry - Taint-aware, XML-ish data serialization

SYNOPSIS

  use Data::FreezeDry ':all';
  my ($ob, $str);


  $ob = MyClass->new();
  $str = freeze($ob);
  $ob = thaw($str);

DESCRIPTION

FreezeDry is a data serializer with several handy features:

Taint aware: FreezeDry does not force you to trust the data you are serializing. None of the input data is executed.
Human readable: FreezeDry produces a human-readable string that simplifies checking the output of your objects.
XML-ish: While I don't (currently) promise full XML compliance, FreezeDry could provably produces a block of XML-ish data that could probably be read in by other XML parsers.

EXPORT

None by default. freeze, thaw, and reconstitute with ':all':

   use Data::FreezeDry ':all';

Subroutines

`freeze($ob)`

freeze serializes a single scalar, has reference, array reference, or scalar references into an XML string, freeze can recurse any number of levels of a nested tree and preserve multiple references to the same object. Let's look at an example:

        my ($tree, $format, $members, $bool, $mysca);

        # anonymous hash
        $format = {
                'app'=>'trini',
                'ver'=>'0.9',
                'ver'=>'this &amp; that',
        };


        # anonymous array
        $members = ['Starflower', 'Mary', 'Paul', 'Hallie', 'Ryan'];


        # blessed object
        $bool = Math::BooleanEval->new('whatever');

        # scalar reference (to an anonymous hash, no less)
        $mysca = {'name'=>'miko', 'email'=>'miko@idocs.com', };

        # the whole thing
        $tree = {
                'dataformat' => $format,
                'otherdataformat' => $format,
                'bool' => $bool,
                'members' => $members,
                'myscaref' => \$mysca,
        };

        $frozen = freeze($tree);

freeze accepts one object as input. The code above results in the following XML-ish string:

   <freezedry ver="1.00">
      <hashref id="0">
         <hashref name="otherdataformat" id="1">
            <scalar name="ver" value="this &#38;amp; that"/>
            <scalar name="app" value="trini"/>
         </hashref>
         <scalarref name="myscaref" id="2">
            <hashref id="3">
               <scalar name="email" value="miko@idocs.com"/>
               <scalar name="name" value="miko"/>
            </hashref>
         </scalarref>
         <hashref name="bool" id="4" class="Math::BooleanEval">
            <hashref name="blanks" id="5">
            </hashref>
            <scalar name="pos" value="0"/>
            <arrayref name="arr" id="6">
               <scalar value="whatever"/>
            </arrayref>
            <scalar name="expr" value="whatever"/>
         </hashref>
         <hashref name="dataformat" id="1" redundant="1"/>
         <arrayref name="members" id="7">
            <scalar value="Starflower"/>
            <scalar value="Mary"/>
            <scalar value="Paul"/>
            <scalar value="Hallie"/>
            <scalar value="Ryan"/>
         </arrayref>
      </hashref>
   </freezedry>

thaw

thaw accepts one argument, the serialized data string, and returns a single value, the reconstituted data, rebuilding the entire data structure including blessed references.

   $tree = thaw($frozen);

reconstitute

reconstitute is identical to ``thaw'', but maintains the ``freeze dry'' metaphor.

Is FreezeDry data XML?

Although FreezeDry's data format is XML-ish, it's not fully compliant to XML in all regards. For now, FreezeDry only promises that it can input its own output. The reason I didn't go for full XML compliance is that I wanted to keep FreezeDry as light as possible while achieving its main goal in life: pure-perl serialization. XML compliance is not part of that goal. If you want to help make FreezeDry fully XML compliant w/o making it bloated, that's cool, drop me an email and we can work together.

TODO

See how people like it

License

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Copyright (c) 2002 by Miko O'Sullivan. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any kind.

AUTHOR

Miko O'Sullivan miko@idocs.com

VERSION

 Version 0.90    June 15, 2002

Data::FreezeDry - Taint-aware, XML-ish data serialization