= tnetstring-rb

Tagged netstrings were conceived by Zed Shaw as a convenient text format for exchanging small amounts of data over the network, based on Dan Bernstein's earlier idea, {netstrings}[http://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt]. They are meant as an alternative to JSON that are easier to handle in low-level network code and simpler to implement.

The following set of intended characteristics of tagged netstrings is excerpted from the {official specification}[http://tnetstrings.org/]:

• Trivial to parse in every language without making errors.
• Resistant to buffer overflows and other problems.
• Fast and low resource intensive.
• Makes no assumptions about string contents and can store binary data without escaping or encoding them.
• Backward compatible with original netstrings.
• Transport agnostic, so it works with streams, messages, files, anything that's 8-bit clean.

Tagged netstrings support the following primitives: strings, integers, booleans (true or false), null (or nil), lists (arrays), and dictionaries (hashes).

Please see the official spec {tnetstrings.org}[http://tnetstrings.org/] for further detail.

== Examples

Given a string in tnetstring format, it can be parsed like so:

str = '5:12345#'
TNetstring.parse(str)

#=> [12345, '']

This returns a tuple that contains the parsed object and any remaining string input.

Encoding an object as a tnetstring is similarly straightforward:

int = 12345
TNetstring.encode(int)

#=> '5:12345#'

Please see the specs in this project for more examples.

== Installation

It's a gem, so do the usual:

gem install tnetstring

== Attribution

The initial implementation was a port of Zed's first (pre-standardization) tnetstrings {implementation in Python}[http://codepad.org/xct0E5ac].

== The Future

Before going 1.0 the library will be converted to a native gem for performance reasons. A native Java/JRuby implementation is planned as well. The current pure Ruby gem may be ported to a tnetstring-pure library.