Question

I’m currently working on a project where I need to transfer objects from ruby to python and back again, obviously serialization is the way to go. I’ve looked at things like yaml but decided to write my own as I didn’t want to deal with the dependencies of the libraries and such when it came time to distribute. I’ve wrote up how this serialization format works here.

my question is that as this format is intended to work cross language between ruby and python,
how should I serialize ruby’s symbols? I’m not aware of a object that works the same way in python. should a dump containing a symbol fail? should I just serialize it as a string? what would be best?

Answer 1

Doesn’t that depend on what your project needs? If symbols are important, you’ll need some way to deal with them.

I’m not a Ruby programmer, but from what I’ve just read, I think converting them to strings is probably easiest. The standard Python interpreter will reuse memory for identical short strings, which seems to be a key reason suggested for using symbols.

EDIT: If it needs to work for other programmers, passing values back and forth shouldn’t change them. So you either have to handle symbols properly, or throw an error straight away. It should be simple enough in Python:

class Symbol(str):
    pass

# In serialising code:
if isinstance(x, Symbol):
    serialise_as_symbol(x)