RFC 7049 - Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)

There’s also a website about the format, including implementations and other things, at http://cbor.io/.

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BruceM 4 years ago | link
CBOR is, to me, an interesting alternative to using JSON for a variety of reasons:
- It allows for better representations of numbers.
- It is extensible through tags.
- It supports indefinite lengths for some data types like arrays, maps and strings.
- It values conciseness, not just in the encoded format but for the encoder / decoder as well.
The RFC also has a good comparison to other encoding formats.
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  JohnCarter 4 years ago | link
  
  I have been reading up quite a bit on this field for awhile now… and the striking thing is the huge array of competing formats.
  
  I’m reminded of the quote, “If a disease has many treatments… it has no cure.”
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mordae 4 years ago | link

I’ve just finished reading that RFC and the format is a blessing. The only sad thing is that it won’t replace old formats. For example dbus (with it’s own encoding that has distinct types for int{8,16,32,64} and libvirt (mis-using XDR) would benefit from it greatly.