M. Tuddenham
August 2023
UDSV SerDe
1. Introduction
This is a rust serde library for the UNIX Delimiter Separated Values (UDSV)
file format.
2. Records vs File
`record_to_str`, and `record_from_str` handle just one record. In the future
there will be `to_str` and `from_str` to handle a whole file of records.
3. Non-specified data types
While Numbers/Enums/Structs/Tuples aren't in the original specification, an
attempt has been made to best (de)serialise them here.
3.1 Numbers
To do.
3.2 Enums
Enums are always externally tagged.
3.3 Struct
Structs are flattened, and the fields are colon-separated. Structs are never
tagged.
3.4 Tuples
Tuples are (de)serialised identically to lists.
3.5 Options
`None` is serialised as the empty string, `Some(x)` is just `x` serialised.
Options are lossy, i.e. there is no distinction between `Some(())`,
`Some("")`, and `None`.
3.6 Booleans
Booleans are serialised as the strings "true" and "false".
4. To do list
- Allow (de)serialising many records e.g. from a file.
- Add tracing to tests https://docs.rs/tracing-test/latest/tracing_test/
- Better errors - provide additional information in its error type, for
example the line and column at which the error occurred, the byte offset into
the input, or the current key being processed.
- Ser
- Disallow nesting
- De
- Allow derseriliasing into a &str - https://serde.rs/lifetimes.html
- Disallow nesting
- floats
- signed ints
- int/float overflow