serialize {base}

R Documentation

Simple Serialization Interface

Description

A simple low-level interface for serializing to connections.

Usage

serialize(object, connection, ascii = FALSE, refhook = NULL)

unserialize(connection, refhook = NULL)

Arguments

object	R object to serialize.
connection	an open connection or (for serialize) NULL or (for unserialize) a raw vector (see ‘Details’).
ascii	a logical. If TRUE, an ASCII representation is written; otherwise (default except for text-mode connections), a more compact binary one is used.
refhook	a hook function for handling reference objects.

Details

The function serialize writes object to the specified connection. If connection is NULL then object is serialized to a raw vector, which is returned as the result of serialize.

Sharing of reference objects is preserved within the object but not across separate calls to serialize.

unserialize reads an object (as written by serialize) from connection or a raw vector.

The refhook functions can be used to customize handling of non-system reference objects (all external pointers and weak references, and all environments other than name space and package environments and .GlobalEnv). The hook function for serialize should return a raw vector for references it wants to handle; otherwise it should return NULL. The hook for unserialize will be called with raw vectors supplied to serialize and should return an appropriate object.

For a text-mode connection, the default value of ascii is set to TRUE: only ASCII representations can be written to text-mode connections and attempting to use ascii = FALSE will throw an error.

Value

For serialize, NULL unless connection = NULL, when the result is returned in a raw vector.

For unserialize an R object.

Warning

These functions are still experimental. Names, interfaces and values might change in future versions (and the value of serialize was changed for R 2.4.0).

A raw vector is limited to 2^{31} - 1 bytes, but R objects can exceed this and their serializations will normally be larger than the objects.

Examples

x <- serialize(list(1,2,3), NULL)
unserialize(x)

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