Serde tutorial for beginners

help
1

Hi all,

Does somebody know a serde tutorial which is meant to beginners ?

I've tried to read the serde documentation and it's not accessible to beginners, at least to me !

I'm trying to achieve a very simple example: serialize and deserialize from a simple tuple like

A (String, u8)

to a simple String.

Like:

A ("Einstein", 80) to "Einstein,80"

but not using #derive for the moment.

Any help appreciated !

2 Likes
2

Generally, you won't be using serde directly (beyond using derives from it), but rather one of serializers/deserializers that use serde internally (serde module does have its uses, but they are fairly advanced use cases).

The format you are requesting is CSV, but I decided to make an example using JSON, as its usage is a bit easier. You can try it on http://play.integer32.com. For CSV, see CSV tutorial.

extern crate serde;
#[macro_use]
extern crate serde_derive;
extern crate serde_json;

#[derive(Debug, Deserialize, Serialize)]
struct A(String, u8);

fn example() -> Result<(), serde_json::Error> {
    let input = A(String::from("Einstein"), 80);

    let json = serde_json::to_string(&input)?;

    println!("JSON: {}", json);

    let back: A = serde_json::from_str(&json)?;

    println!("Back to A: {:?}", back);

    Ok(())
}

fn main() {
    example().unwrap();
}

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] allows the structure to be serialized and deserialized using serde formats, like JSON or CSV. That's all what serde is used for here, everything else is done by serde_json. With CSV, everything will be done by csv, and so on.

3 Likes
3

@xfix Thanks for taking the time to write this simple example as a tutorial !

I'll probably use it when I have to deal with known formats de/serialization.

But my purpose was to implement the serialize() and deserialize() method, using my simple structure. I have a dedicated format I'd like to serialize()/deserialize(). I've tried to understand the examples, but that's not so straightforward.

4

Serde's architecture makes it so that, even if you're making your own format, you can, and should, still get away with auto-deriving serialize and deserialize, because those trait implementations are shared by every data format (see Serde's data model.)

2 Likes
5

Thanks for your reply. It didn't get enough time to dive into those links but as soon as I'll implement serde, I'll give a look.