Re: string serialization of builtin datatypes

[Oliver Heimlich]

On 06.05.2015 19:47, Andreas Weber wrote:
> Dear users,
>
> I once wrote a serialize function
> (https://github.com/octave-de/serialize) to get a human readable string
> representation of built in datatypes. To restore the var just call eval.
> The intended purpose is to serialize objects for transmission over
> byte-stream channels (serial, tcp...) or for storage in databases while
> perserve the readability by humans(in contrast to the usage of
> typecast(x, "uint8" for example).
>
> Does anyone see an octave-forge package this might fit in?

Andy,

the function might fit into the io package, but I am not sure.

Some remarks for improvement of the function:
 - If you want to ensure exact restoration of the original value, you 
certainly want to increase the precision during the call to mat2str for 
binary64 numbers.
 - Also you should vectorize function evaluation with the usage of 
cellfun/structfun instead of for-loops.

> btw: Do we have a function which checks a string for malicious code
> before evaluating? For example wget, system, unlink and so on.

I don't think it exists. This is the big disadvantage of serializing 
data into code that has to be eval'ed. Did you try JSON or YAML as a 
readable kind of serialization?

Oliver