Serialization

File Format
Name	Serialization
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Serialization
No, I said serial, idiot.

Serialization is used to transform data structures (as used within a program, in whatever native formats might be used by the programming language the program is in) into a file or data stream of standardized format to be saved for later use, or transmitted through a network to be used by a different program elsewhere.

Serialization formats

• Avro
• Bebop [1]
• Bencode (used by BitTorrent)
• BSON
• Cap'n Proto
• CBOR (RFC 7049) [2]
• CoffeeScript-Object-Notation (CSON)
• Concise Encoding [3]
• Cursive Script Object Notation
• DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules)
• FDF
• FlatBuffers
• Form URL encoding (application/x-www-form-urlencoded)
• Hjson
• I-JSON
• Ion [4]
• IWA (Apple iWork serialization; .iwa)
• Java Object Serialization
• JSON (.json)
• JSON5 (.json5) [5]
• JSONH [6]
• JSONx
• LCON [7]
• MessagePack [8]
• Microsoft XNA Compiled Format (.xnb)
• Minecraft NBT format
• Multipart/Form-Data
• OLE Property Set
• Pickle (Python)
• PostScript binary object format
• Property List (.plist)
• Protobuf (Protocol Buffers; a Google format also used within IWA)
• RELOAD
• Simple Binary Encoding
  • SBE Intermediate Representation
• Thrift
  • Thrift binary protocol
  • Thrift compact protocol
• Transit [9]
• XFDF
• XML (originally intended only as a markup format, but ended up as probably the most popular serialization format)
• YAML (.yaml)

Miscellaneous related things

• EDI

See Also

• Databases
• Markup
• Metaformats
• Protocols
• Text-based data
• Transfer Encodings