Crate serde_any

Serde Any

Dynamic serialization and deserialization with the format chosen at runtime

Deserialization with a known format

If the deserialization format is known in advance, serde_any mirrors the API of serde_json and serde_yaml. Namely, functions from_reader, from_slice and from_str work in the same way as those in format-specific crates, except that they take an additional Format paramater specifying the deserialization format. The from_file function is provided as a convenience wrapper around from_reader for the common case of reading from a file.

Deserialization by guessing

This crate also supports deserialization where the data format is not known in advance. There are three different ways of inferring the data format:

• with from_file, the format is deduced from the file extension. This is useful if a user can load a data file of any format.
• with from_file_stem, each filename with the given stem and a supported extension is checked. If any such file exists, its data is deserialized and returned. This is useful for configuration files with a known set of filenames.
• with from_slice_any and from_str_any, deserialization using each supported format is tried until one succeeds. This is useful when you receive data from an unknown source and don't know what format it is in.

Note there is no corresponding from_reader_any function, as attempting to deserialize from a reader would consume its data. In order to deserialize from a std::io::Read, read the data into a Vec<u8> or String and call from_slice_any or from_str_any.

Serialization

For serialization, the data format must always be provided. Consistent with the format-specific crates, data may be serialized to a String with to_string, to a Vec<u8> with to_vec, or to a std::io::Write with to_writer.

Alternatively, when writing to a file, the format can be inferred from the file name by the to_file function. Similarly to from_file, this is most useful when saving to a user-selected file.

There is no support for pretty-printing yet.

Enums

Error	The common error type
Format	Serialization or deserialization formats

Functions

from_file	Deserialize from a file
from_file_stem	Deserialize from any file with a given stem
from_reader	Deserialize from an IO stream using a specified format
from_slice	Deserialize from a byte slice using a specified format
from_slice_any	Deserialize from a byte slice using any supported format
from_str	Deserialize from a string using a specified format
from_str_any	Deserialize from a string using any supported format
guess_format	Attempt to guess the serialization/deserialization format from a file name
guess_format_from_extension	Attempt to guess the serialization/deserialization format from a file extension
supported_extensions	Return a list of recognized file extensions
supported_formats	Return a list of supported formats
to_file	Serialize to a file
to_string	Serialize to a String
to_vec	Serialize to a byte vector
to_writer	Serialize to a writer