About

Data.Binary is a library for high performance binary serialisation of Haskell data. It uses the ByteString library to achieve efficient, lazy reading and writing of structures in binary format.

Chris Eidhof writes on his use of Data.Binary implementing a full-text search engine:

   "The communication with Sphinx is done using a quite low-level binary
    protocol, but Data.Binary saved the day: it made it very easy for us
    to parse all the binary things. Especially the use of the Get and
    Put monads are a big improvement over the manual reading and keeping
    track of positions, as is done in the PHP/Python clients."
    

Example

import Data.Binary
import Control.Monad
import Codec.Compression.GZip

-- A Haskell AST structure
data Exp = IntE Int
         | OpE  String Exp Exp
   deriving Eq

-- An instance of Binary to encode and decode an Exp in binary
instance Binary Exp where
     put (IntE i)          = put (0 :: Word8) >> put i
     put (OpE s e1 e2)     = put (1 :: Word8) >> put s >> put e1 >> put e2
     get = do tag <- getWord8
              case tag of
                  0 -> liftM  IntE get
                  1 -> liftM3 OpE  get get get

-- A test expression
e = OpE "*" (IntE 7) (OpE "/" (IntE 4) (IntE 2))

-- Serialise and compress with gzip, then decompress and deserialise
main = do
    let t  = compress (encode e)
    print t
    let e' = decode (decompress t)
    print (e == e')

Download

Download

• Documentation

Project Activity

Starring...

• Lennart Kolmodin
• Duncan Coutts
• Don Stewart
• Spencer Janssen
• David Himmelstrup
• Björn Bringert
• Ross Paterson
• Einar Karttunen
• John Meacham
• Ulf Norell
• Bryan O'Sullivan
• Tomasz Zielonka
• Florian Weimer
• Judah Jacobson