Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I’m looking for some information and a little history. I am writing a program and I want to save some data without using a database. I’m assuming I could use XML but what else can I use? How do you save data to files and then retrieve them without XML and without plain text? What is Binary formatting, can that be used? Isn’t binary formatting what Microsoft used to use for Office files? I am unsure about how to go about this, and would appreciate any help, thanks.
‘Binary formatting’ is a pretty vague term. Basically it’s ‘anything other than plain text formatting.’
You can pick whatever format you want to write your data to disk. If you use an existing format (XML, ini-file, Protocol Buffers, Thrift etc) you benefit from there already being code to write/parse the data. If you write your own custom format, you can tailor it to your exact requirements.
This issue was discussed in another question.