Human readable formats tend not to include a universally agreed way to represent arbitrary binary data, which means those serde libraries can end up using a representation for serde's "bytes" type which isn't ideal for all uses.
// [dependencies]
// serde = { version = "1.0", features = ["derive"] }
// serde_bytes = "0.11"
// serde_json = "1.0"
// serde_yaml = "0.8"
// toml = "0.5"
use serde::Serialize;
#[derive(Serialize)]
struct Demo {
#[serde(with = "serde_bytes")]
bytes: Vec<u8>,
}
fn main() {
let bytes = b"testing".to_vec();
let s = Demo { bytes };
println!("JSON: {}", serde_json::to_string(&s).unwrap());
println!("YAML: {}", serde_yaml::to_string(&s).unwrap());
println!("TOML: {}", toml::to_string(&s).unwrap());
}
JSON: {"bytes":[116,101,115,116,105,110,103]}
YAML: ---
bytes:
- 116
- 101
- 115
- 116
- 105
- 110
- 103
TOML: bytes = [116, 101, 115, 116, 105, 110, 103]
This adapter lets you control how the bytes are represented by wrapping a serializer like this:
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct Demo {
#[serde(with = "serde_bytes")]
bytes: Vec<u8>,
}
fn main() {
let bytes = b"testing".to_vec();
let demo = Demo { bytes };
let mut out = vec![];
let mut ser = serde_json::Serializer::new(&mut out);
let base64_config = base64::Config::new(base64::CharacterSet::UrlSafe, true);
let ser = BytesRepr::base64(&mut ser, base64_config);
demo.serialize(ser).unwrap();
let serialized = String::from_utf8(out).unwrap();
println!("JSON(base64): {}", serialized);
}
Outputs:
JSON(base64): {"bytes":"dGVzdGluZw=="}