Deco - Delimiter Collision Free Format

Deco is a human readable text format which avoids the delimiter collision problem.

Deco has minimal and simple syntax, while still being able to represent grouping and nesting. It's very easy to read and write by humans.

For example this is how the JSON example from Wikipedia would look like in Deco:

firstName: John
lastName: Smith
isAlive: true
age: 27
address:
    streetAddress: 21 2nd Street
    city: New York
    state: NY
    postalCode: 10021-3100
:
phoneNumbers:
    type: home
    number: 212 555-1234
    type: office
    number: 646 555-4567
    type: mobile
    number: 123 456-7890
:
children:
:
spouse: null

{
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "isAlive": true,
  "age": 27,
  "address": {
    "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
    "city": "New York",
    "state": "NY",
    "postalCode": "10021-3100"
  },
  "phoneNumbers": [
    {
      "type": "home",
      "number": "212 555-1234"
    },
    {
      "type": "office",
      "number": "646 555-4567"
    },
    {
      "type": "mobile",
      "number": "123 456-7890"
    }
  ],
  "children": [],
  "spouse": null
}

Since Deco is simple and doesn't have to deal with delimiter collisions it's also efficient. In a benchmark against JSON Deco had:

• ~44% smaller file size
• ~380% faster output serialization
• ~580% faster input parsing

To learn how to use the Deco format, see the tutorial.

To learn how the Deco format works, see the specification.

Deco Library

The Deco library is header-only and uses C++17.

A Conan package is available: https://conan.io/center/deco

Using

To learn how to use the Deco library see the documentation, and the tests for examples.

Manual Packaging

The library uses Premake with Conan package manager to manage dependencies. you need to add the following Conan packages manually using the command conan create . enhex/stable --build=outdated from their root directory (where the conanfile.py is located):
https://github.com/Enhex/generic_serialization
https://github.com/Enhex/strong_type

Then use the same command to create a package for Deco.
Using Conan you can consume the library as the package deco/master@enhex/stable.

Note

While Deco is not absolutely "collision free", it's only potentially needs escaping once at the start/end of an entry, compared to other formats that need delimiters to be escaped N times. So it's O(1) vs O(N) in a sense, which makes Deco fundamentally better.