/pico8-table-serialize

Serializes a Lua table into a string

Primary LanguageLua

pico8-table-serialize

Table serializer inspired by this pull request for pico8-table-string.

Supports indexed and/or keyed tables containing string, number, and boolean values. Also supports nested tables.

Caveats

  • Usually persists a table using less characters than pico8-table-string, but costs 14 tokens more to deserialize.

  • If your table is primarily string values containing ASCII control characters, eg binary data, it may actually consume more characters than pico8-table-string.

  • Will fail if a string value contains the ASCII sequence \3\120\23, which is used to delimit the end of a string value.

Usage

Serialize

Before placing output from tbl_serialize() in your code, it will need to be escaped using something like escape_binary_str().

-- define a table
my_table = {
	1,
	"two",
	true,
	foo = "bar",
	nested = {
		biz = "baz"
	}
}

-- serialize
output = tbl_serialize(my_table)

-- optional,
-- validate output
tbl_serialize_validate(
	my_table,
	tbl_deserialize(output)
)

-- print to host
printh(
	escape_binary_str(output),
	"@clip"
)

Deserialize

my_table = tbl_deserialize(str)