Taxi(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Taxi(3)NAMEData::Taxi - Taint-aware, XML-ish data serialization
PLEASE NOTE: Data::Taxi is no longer being developed or supported.
SYNOPSIS
use Data::Taxi ':all';
my ($ob, $str);
$ob = MyClass->new();
$str = freeze($ob);
$ob = thaw($str);
INSTALLATIONData::Taxi can be installed with the usual routine:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
You can also just copy Taxi.pm into the Data/ directory of one of your
library trees.
DESCRIPTION
Taxi (Taint-Aware XML-Ish) is a data serializer with several handy
features:
Taint aware
Taxi does not force you to trust the data you are serializing.
None of the input data is executed.
Human readable
Taxi produces a human-readable string that simplifies checking the
output of your objects.
XML-ish
While I don't (currently) promise full XML compliance, Taxi
produces a block of XML-ish data that could probably be read in by
other XML parsers.
EXPORT
None by default. freeze and thaw with ':all':
use Data::Taxi ':all';
Subroutines
freeze($ob, %opts)
"freeze" serializes a single scalar, hash reference, array reference,
or scalar reference into an XML string, "freeze" can recurse any number
of levels of a nested tree and preserve multiple references to the same
object. Let's look at an example:
my ($tree, $format, $members, $bool, $mysca);
# anonymous hash
$format = {
'app'=>'trini',
'ver'=>'0.9',
'ver'=>'this & 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:
<taxi ver="1.00">
<hashref id="0">
<hashref name="otherdataformat" id="1">
<scalar name="ver" value="this & 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>
</taxi>
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);
IS TAXI DATA XML?
Although Taxi's data format is XML-ish, it's not fully compliant to XML
in all regards. For now, Taxi 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 Taxi 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 Taxi fully XML compliant w/o making it
bloated, that's cool, drop me an email and we can work together.
TODO
Tied scalars don't work. The code started getting spaghettish trying
to implement them, so I decided to use the Asimov method and stop
thinking about it for a while. Tied hashes and arrays should work
fine.
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
initial public release
Version 0.91 July 10, 2002
minor improvment to documentation
Version 0.94 April 26, 2003
Fixed problem handling undefined scalars.
Version 0.95 Oct 31, 2008
Adding notice of last release
Version 0.96 Nov 14, 2010
Fixing bug:
POD ERRORS
Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained
below:
Around line 684:
=end CPAN without matching =begin. (Stack: [empty])
perl v5.14.1 2011-06-21 Taxi(3)
