Serpent provides ast.literal_eval() compatible object tree serialization. It serializes an object tree into bytes (utf-8 encoded string) that can be decoded and then passed as-is to ast.literal_eval() to rebuild it as the original object tree. As such it is safe to send serpent data to other machines over the network for instance (because only 'safe' literals are encoded).

More info on Pypi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/serpent Source code is on Github: https://github.com/irmen/Serpent

Copyright by Irmen de Jong (irmen@razorvine.net) This software is released under the MIT software license. This license, including disclaimer, is available in the 'LICENSE' file.

Package can be found on Pypi as 'serpent': https://pypi.python.org/pypi/serpent Example usage can be found in ./example.py

Package is available on www.nuget.org as 'Razorvine.Serpent'. Full source code can be found in ./dotnet/ directory. Example usage can be found in ./dotnet/Serpent.Test/Example.cs

Maven-artefact is available on maven central, groupid 'net.razorvine' artifactid 'serpent'. Full source code can be found in ./java/ directory. Example usage can be found in ./java/test/SerpentExample.java

Compatible with Python 2.7+ (including 3.x), IronPython 2.7+, Jython 2.7+.

Serpent handles several special Python types to make life easier:

• str --> promoted to unicode (see below why this is)
• bytes, bytearrays, memoryview, buffer --> string, base-64 (you'll have to manually un-base64 them though. Can use serpent.tobytes function)
• uuid.UUID, datetime.{datetime, date, time, timespan} --> appropriate string/number
• decimal.Decimal --> string (to not lose precision)
• array.array typecode 'c'/'u' --> string/unicode
• array.array other typecode --> list
• Exception --> dict with some fields of the exception (message, args)
• collections module types --> mostly equivalent primitive types or dict
• enums --> the value of the enum (Python 3.4+)
• all other types --> dict with the __getstate__ or vars() of the object

Notes:

All str will be promoted to unicode. This is done because it is the default anyway for Python 3.x, and it solves the problem of the str/unicode difference between different Python versions. Also it means the serialized output doesn't have those problematic 'u' prefixes on strings.

The serializer is not thread-safe. Make sure you're not making changes to the object tree that is being serialized, and don't use the same serializer in different threads.

Because the serialized format is just valid Python source code, it can contain comments. Serpent does not add comments by itself apart from the single header line.

Set literals are not supported on python <3.2 (ast.literal_eval limitation). If you need Python < 3.2 compatibility, you'll have to use set_literals=False when serializing. Since version 1.6 serpent chooses this wisely for you by default, but you can still override it if needed.

Floats +inf and -inf are handled via a trick, Float 'nan' cannot be handled and is represented by the special value: {'__class__':'float','value':'nan'} We chose not to encode it as just the string 'NaN' because that could cause memory issues when used in multiplications.