This is a comparison of data serialization formats, various ways to convert complex objects to sequences of bits. It does not include markup languages used exclusively as document file formats.

Overview

Name Creator-maintainer Based on Standardized? Specification Binary? Human-readable? Supports references? Schema-IDL? Standard APIs Supports zero-copy operations Apache Arrow Apache Software Foundation Arrow Columnar Format C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Matlab, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Swift Apache Avro Apache Software Foundation Apache Avro™ Specification C, C#, C++, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby Apache Parquet Apache Software Foundation Apache Parquet Java, Python, C++ Apache Thrift Facebook (creator)Apache (maintainer) Original whitepaper C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml, Delphi and other languagesApache Thrift ASN.1 ISO, IEC, ITU-T ISO/IEC 8824 / ITU-T X.680 (syntax) and ISO/IEC 8825 / ITU-T X.690 (encoding rules) series. X.680, X.681, and X.683 define syntax and semantics. Bencode Bram Cohen (creator)BitTorrent, Inc. (maintainer) Part of BitTorrent protocol specification BSON MongoDB JSON BSON Specification Cap'n Proto Kenton Varda Cap'n Proto Encoding Spec CBOR Carsten Bormann, P. Hoffman MessagePack RFC 8949 , through tagging Comma-separated values (CSV) RFC author:Yakov Shafranovich RFC 4180(among others) Common Data Representation (CDR) Object Management Group General Inter-ORB Protocol Ada, C, C++, Java, Cobol, Lisp, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk D-Bus Message Protocol freedesktop.org D-Bus Specification (Signature strings) Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) W3C XML, Efficient XML Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0 Extensible Data Notation (edn) Rich Hickey / Clojure community Clojure Official edn spec Clojure, Ruby, Go, C++, Javascript, Java, CLR, ObjC, Python FlatBuffers Google Flatbuffers GitHub (internal to the buffer) C++, Java, C#, Go, Python, Rust, JavaScript, PHP, C, Dart, Lua, TypeScript Fast Infoset ISO, IEC, ITU-T XML ITU-T X.891 and ISO/IEC 24824-1:2007 FHIR Health Level 7 REST basics Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources Hapi for FHIR JSON, XML, Turtle INI Microsoft Several different exists Ion Amazon JSON The Amazon Ion Specification C, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust Java serialization Oracle Corporation Java Object Serialization JSON Douglas Crockford JavaScript syntax STD 90/RFC 8259(ancillary:RFC 6901,RFC 6902), ECMA-404, ISO/IEC 21778:2017 , but see BSON, Smile, UBJSON (JSON Schema Proposal, ASN.1 with JER, Kwalify , Rx, JSON-LD (Clarinet, JSONQuery / RQL, JSONPath), JSON-LD MessagePack Sadayuki Furuhashi JSON (loosely) MessagePack format specification Netstrings Dan Bernstein netstrings.txt OGDL Rolf Veen Specification OPC-UA Binary OPC Foundation opcfoundation.org OpenDDL Eric Lengyel C, PHP OpenDDL.org PHP serialization format PHP Group Pickle (Python) Guido van Rossum Python PEP 3154 – Pickle protocol version 4 cpython/Lib/pickle.py Property list NeXT (creator)Apple (maintainer) Public DTD for XML format Cocoa, CoreFoundation, OpenStep, GnuStep Protocol Buffers (protobuf) Google Developer Guide: Encoding, proto2 specification, and proto3 specification C++, Java, C#, Python, Go, Ruby, Objective-C, C, Dart, Perl, PHP, R, Rust, Scala, Swift, Julia, D, ActionScript, Delphi, Elixir, Elm, Erlang, GopherJS, Haskell, Haxe, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, Matlab, Mercurt, OCaml, Prolog, Solidity, TypeScript, Vala, Visual Basic John McCarthy (original)Ron Rivest (internet draft) Lisp, Netstrings "S-Expressions" Internet Draft , canonical representation , advanced transport representation Smile Tatu Saloranta JSON Smile Format Specification (JSON Schema Proposal, other JSON schemas/IDLs) (via JSON APIs implemented with Smile backend, on Jackson, Python) SOAP W3C XML SOAP/1.1SOAP/1.2 (, , , MTOM, ) Max Wildgrube RFC 3072 TOML Tom Preston-Werner INI file format Version 1.1.0Latest version UBJSON The Buzz Media, LLC JSON, BSON ubjson.org eXternal Data Representation (XDR) Sun Microsystems (creator)IETF (maintainer) STD 67/RFC 4506 XML W3C SGML 1.0 (Fifth Edition)1.1 (Second Edition) (, , , ) XML-RPC Dave Winer XML XML-RPC Specification YAML Clark Evans,Ingy döt Net,and Oren Ben-Kiki C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Email, HTML, MIME, URI, XML, SAX, SOAP, JSON Version 1.2 (Kwalify , Rx, built-in language type-defs) Name Creator-maintainer Based on Standardized? Specification Binary? Human-readable? Supports references? Schema-IDL? Standard APIs Supports zero-copy operations

Syntax comparison of human-readable formats

Format Null Boolean true Boolean false Integer Floating-point String Array Associative array/Object ASN.1(XML Encoding Rules) true false 685230 6.8523015e+5 <SeqOfUnrelatedDatatypes> <isMarried>true</isMarried> <hobby /> <velocity>-42.1e7</velocity> <bookname>A to Z</bookname> <bookname>We said, "no".</bookname> </SeqOfUnrelatedDatatypes> An object (the key is a field name): <person> <isMarried>true</isMarried> <hobby /> <height>1.85</height> <name>Bob Peterson</name> </person>

A data mapping (the key is a data value): <competition> <measurement> <name>John</name> <height>3.14</height> </measurement> <measurement> <name>Jane</name> <height>2.718</height> </measurement> </competition> CSV null(or an empty element in the row) 1true 0false 685230-685230 6.8523015e+5 true,,-42.1e7,"A to Z" 42,1 A to Z,1,2,3 edn nil true false 685230-685230 6.8523015e+5 "A to Z", "A \"up to\" Z" [true nil -42.1e7 "A to Z"] {:kw 1, "42" true, "A to Z" [1 2 3]} Ionnull null.null null.bool null.int null.float null.decimal null.timestamp null.string null.symbol null.blob null.clob null.struct null.list null.sexp true false 685230-6852300xA74AE0b111010010101110 6.8523015e5 "A to Z"'''A to Z'''[true, null, -42.1e7, "A to Z"]{'42': true, 'A to Z': [1, 2, 3]} Netstrings 0:,4:null, 1:1,4:true, 1:0,5:false, 6:685230, 9:6.8523e+5, 29:4:true,0:,7:-42.1e7,6:A to Z,, JSON null true false 685230-685230 6.8523015e+5 [true, null, -42.1e7, "A to Z"]{"42": true, "A to Z": [1, 2, 3]} OGDL null true false 685230 6.8523015e+5 "A to Z"'A to Z'NoSpaces true null -42.1e7 "A to Z" (true, null, -42.1e7, "A to Z")42 true "A to Z" 1 2 3 42 true "A to Z", (1, 2, 3) OpenDDL ref {null} bool {true} bool {false} int32 {685230}int32 {0x74AE}int32 {0b111010010101110} float {6.8523015e+5} string {"A to Z"} Homogeneous array:

int32 {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

Heterogeneous array:

array { bool {true} ref {null} float {-42.1e7} string {"A to Z"} } dict { value (key = "42") {bool {true}} value (key = "A to Z") {int32 {1, 2, 3}} } PHP serialization format N; b:1; b:0; i:685230;i:-685230; d:685230.15;d:INF;d:-INF;d:NAN; s:6:"A to Z"; a:4:{i:0;b:1;i:1;N;i:2;d:-421000000;i:3;s:6:"A to Z";} Associative array:a:2:{i:42;b:1;s:6:"A to Z";a:3:{i:0;i:1;i:1;i:2;i:2;i:3;}}Object:O:8:"stdClass":2:{s:4:"John";d:3.14;s:4:"Jane";d:2.718;} Pickle (Python) N. I01\n. I00\n. I685230\n. F685230.15\n. S'A to Z'\n. (lI01\na(laF-421000000.0\naS'A to Z'\na. (dI42\nI01\nsS'A to Z'\n(lI1\naI2\naI3\nas. Property list(plain text format) <*BY> <*BN> <*I685230> <*R6.8523015e+5> "A to Z" ( <*BY>, <*R-42.1e7>, "A to Z" ) { "42" = <*BY>; "A to Z" = ( <*I1>, <*I2>, <*I3> ); } Property list(XML format) 685230 6.8523015e+5 <array> <true /> <real>-42.1e7</real> <string>A to Z</string> </array> <dict> <key>42</key> <true /> <key>A to Z</key> <array> <integer>1</integer> <integer>2</integer> <integer>3</integer> </array> </dict> Protocol Buffers true false 685230-685230 20.0855369 field1: "value1" field1: "value2" field1: "value3 anotherfield { foo: 123 bar: 456 } anotherfield { foo: 222 bar: 333 } thing1: "blahblah" thing2: 18923743 thing3: -44 thing4 { submessage_field1: "foo" submessage_field2: false } enumeratedThing: SomeEnumeratedValue thing5: 123.456 [extensionFieldFoo]: "etc" [extensionFieldThatIsAnEnum]: EnumValue S-expressions NILnil T#ttrue NIL#ffalse 685230 6.8523015e+5 abc"abc"#616263#3:abc{MzphYmM=}|YWJj| (T NIL -42.1e7 "A to Z") ((42 T) ("A to Z" (1 2 3))) TOML true false 685230+685_230-6852300x_0A_74_AE0b1010_0111_0100_1010_11106.8523015e+5685.230_15e+03685_230.15inf-infnan "A to Z"'A to Z' ["y", -42.1e7, "A to Z"] [ "y", -42.1e7, "A to Z" ] { John = 3.14, Jane = 2.718 } 42 = y "A to Z" = [1, 2, 3] YAML ~nullNullNULL yYyesYesYESonOnONtrueTrueTRUE nNnoNoNOoffOffOFFfalseFalseFALSE 685230+685_230-685230024722560x_0A_74_AE0b1010_0111_0100_1010_1110190:20:306.8523015e+5685.230_15e+03685_230.15190:20:30.15.inf-.inf.Inf.INF.NaN.nan.NAN A to Z"A to Z"'A to Z' [y, ~, -42.1e7, "A to Z"] - y - - -42.1e7 - A to Z {"John":3.14, "Jane":2.718} 42: y A to Z: [1, 2, 3] XML and SOAP true false 685230 6.8523015e+5 <item>true</item> <item xsi:nil="true"/> <item>-42.1e7</item> <item>A to Z<item><map> <entry key="42">true</entry> <entry key="A to Z"> <item val="1"/> <item val="2"/> <item val="3"/> </entry> </map> XML-RPC 1 0 685230 6.8523015e+5 A to Z<value><array> <data> <value><boolean>1</boolean></value> <value><double>-42.1e7</double></value> <value><string>A to Z</string></value> </data> </array></value><value><struct> <member> <name>42</name> <value><boolean>1</boolean></value> </member> <member> <name>A to Z</name> <value> <array> <data> <value><int>1</int></value> <value><int>2</int></value> <value><int>3</int></value> </data> </array> </value> </member> </struct>

Comparison of binary formats

Format Null Booleans Integer Floating-point String Array Associative array/object ASN.1(BER, PER or OER encoding) type : : : Multiple valid types () Data specifications (unordered) and (guaranteed order) User definable type BSON \x0A(1 byte) True: \x08\x01False: \x08\x00(2 bytes) int32: 32-bit little-endian 2's complement or int64: 64-bit little-endian 2's complement Double: little-endian binary64 UTF-8-encoded, preceded by int32-encoded string length in bytes BSON embedded document with numeric keys BSON embedded document Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) \xf6(1 byte) (1 byte) Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) (Unpreserved lexical values format) xsi:nil is not allowed in binary context. 1–2 bit integer interpreted as boolean. Boolean sign, plus arbitrary length 7-bit octets, parsed until most-significant bit is 0, in little-endian. The schema can set the zero-point to any arbitrary number. Unsigned skips the boolean flag. Length prefixed integer-encoded Unicode. Integers may represent enumerations or string table entries instead. Length prefixed set of items. FlatBuffers Encoded as absence of field in parent object (1 byte) Little-endian 2's complement signed and unsigned 8/16/32/64 bits UTF-8-encoded, preceded by 32-bit integer length of string in bytes Vectors of any other type, preceded by 32-bit integer length of number of elements Tables (schema defined types) or Vectors sorted by key (maps / dictionaries) IonIon Binary Encoding \x0f \xbx Arbitrary length and overhead. Length in octets. MessagePack \xc0 Typecode (1 byte) + IEEE single/double encoding is unspecified Netstrings Length-encoded as an ASCII string + ':' + data + ',' Length counts only octets between ':' and ',' OGDL Binary Property list(binary format) Protocol Buffers UTF-8-encoded, preceded by varint-encoded integer length of string in bytes Repeated value with the same tag or, for varint-encoded integers only, values packed contiguously and prefixed by tag and total byte length Smile \x21 IEEE single/double, BigDecimal Length-prefixed "short" Strings (up to 64 bytes), marker-terminated "long" Strings and (optional) back-references Arbitrary-length heterogenous arrays with end-marker Arbitrary-length key/value pairs with end-marker Structured Data eXchange Formats (SDXF) Big-endian signed 24-bit or 32-bit integer Big-endian IEEE double Either UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1 encoded List of elements with identical ID and size, preceded by array header with int16 length Chunks can contain other chunks to arbitrary depth. Thrift