A space-efficient serialization module based on bencode, which can be used to decode strings from untrusted sources. Works well for complex, heterogeneous data structures with many small elements. The encodings take considerably less space than bencode, gherkin, and Recipe 415503 for that use case, and this module is faster, too. Source (MIT license) is available from: http://barnesc.blogspot.com/2006/01/ rencode-reduced-length-encodings.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Comparison of rencode with similar modules --------------------------------------------------------------------- Connelly Barnes, 2006-01-23. The following data structures were used: Case 1: range(100) Case 2: range(10000) Case 3: {192: [3.3492934923942394, 1.230030343242342, 9.4929349232349243, 9.4939349349394931, 4.342992349295949, 0.4309953949239393], 298: [6.3249093409490905, 2.439009234090990, 0.9139904909090434, 5.8795437823407908, 3.529098080909880, 4.5899843289893433]} All modules were modified to use 64-bit float encoding. Case 4: {'abc': 'abc0123', 'def': 'def0123', 'ghi': 'ghi0123', '0123456789': '0123456789'} Case 5: ' '*10000 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Results --------------------------------------------------------------------- The four modules rencode, bencode, gherkin and Recipe 415503 were used to encode each of the preceding data structures. The size of the encoded string and the number of calls per second to the encoding function (on a Windows 3.0 GHz Intel machine) are summarized: rencode bencode gherkin recipe Case 1: 170 392 511 505 bytes 19315.318 10002.625 6080.862 5170.539 calls/sec Case 2: 29842 58892 50011 50005 bytes 148.454 88.767 59.236 52.619 calls/sec Case 3: 117 N/A 149 143 bytes 51254.721 N/A 15470.597 17869.132 calls/sec Case 4: 59 70 121 115 bytes 118209.471 64589.227 20216.850 22516.589 calls/sec Case 5: 10006 10006 10011 10005 bytes 100186.770 100663.271 75245.603 102635.125 calls/sec The source code used to build this table is available at: http://oregonstate.edu/~barnesc/python/rencode_compare.py __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com