BSON

BSON.jl is a Julia package for working with the Binary JSON serialisation format. It can be used as a general store for Julia data structures, with the following features:

Lightweight and ubiquitous, with a simple JSON-like data model and clients in many languages.
Efficient for binary data (eg. arrays of floats).
Flexible enough to handle anything you throw at it – closures, custom types, circular data structures, etc.
Backwards compatible, so that if data layout changes old files will still load.

julia> using BSON

julia> bson("test.bson", Dict(:a => [1+2im, 3+4im], :b => "Hello, World!"))

julia> BSON.load("test.bson")
Dict{Symbol,Any} with 2 entries:
  :a => Complex{Int64}[1+2im, 3+4im]
  :b => "Hello, World!"

(Note that the top-level object in BSON is always a Dict{Symbol,Any}).

⚠️ Warning: Loading BSON files is not safe from malicious or erroneously constructed data. Loading BSON files can cause arbitrary code to execute on your machine. Do not load files from unknown or untrusted sources.

There a few utility methods for working with BSON files.

julia> using BSON

julia> bson("test.bson", a = 1, b = 2)

julia> BSON.load("test.bson")
Dict{Symbol,Any} with 2 entries:
  :a => 1
  :b => 2

julia> using BSON: @save, @load

julia> a, b = 1, 2
(1, 2)

julia> @save "test.bson" a b # Same as above

julia> @load "test.bson" a b # Loads `a` and `b` back into the workspace

For external files you can use BSON.parse to load raw BSON data structures without any Julia-specific interpretation. In basic cases, this will look that same, but Julia-specific types will be stored in a more complex format.

julia> BSON.parse("test.bson")
Dict{Symbol,Any} with 2 entries:
  :a => 1
  :b => 2

julia> BSON.parse("test.bson")[:data]
Dict{Symbol,Any} with 4 entries:
  :tag  => "array"
  :type => Dict(:tag=>"datatype",:params=>Any[],:name=>["Core","Int64"])
  :size => [3]
  :data => UInt8[0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x00  …  ]

This is also how the data will appear to readers in other languages, should you wish to move data outside of Julia.

Stamp1993/BSON.jl

BSON