[erlang-questions] unexpected result of term_to_binary

[Joe Armstrong]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Dmitry Kolesnikov
<dmkolesnikov@REDACTED>wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> There is a well document External Term Format protocol. I am not here to
> judge that protocol but it is implementable on other languages as well (
> https://github.com/rustyio/BERT-JS). Yes, it make sense in scopes of that
> protocol specification.
>
> Long time ago, I've been trying to use it for WebApp development and …
> switched to JSON. :-)
>

There is a slight problem here. Binary data arriving on sockets often ends
up stored in javascript as UTF-8 strings - but these is no guarantee that
an arbitrary erlang term when converted to the external format is a valid
UTF8 string ....

/Joe


> But I strongly believe that External Term Format make sense for other
> use-case...
>
>
> Best Regards,
> Dmitry
>
>
> On Jan 21, 2013, at 10:00 PM, Steve Davis <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi Dmitry,
> >
> > It "makes sense" only if the "binary_to_term" decode is done in erlang.
> >
> > br,
> > /s
> >
> > On Jan 21, 2013, at 1:53 PM, Dmitry Kolesnikov <dmkolesnikov@REDACTED>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> This make sense to me!
> >>
> >> term_to_binary/1 returns a binary data object which is the result of
> encoding Term according to the Erlang external term format. See
> http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html
> >>
> >> Use list_to_binary or unicode:character_to_binary depends on your
> use-case.
> >>
> >> - Dmitry
> >>
> >> On Jan 21, 2013, at 9:38 PM, Steve Davis <
> steven.charles.davis@REDACTED> wrote:
> >>
> >>> The following appears to encode lists of integers as strings (?!?):
> >>>
> >>> Eshell V5.9.3  (abort with ^G)
> >>> 1> term_to_binary([1,2,3,4]).
> >>> <<131,107,0,4,1,2,3,4>>
> >>>
> >>> Is there a reason for this that I'm missing?
> >>>
> >>> regs,
> >>> /s
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> erlang-questions mailing list
> >>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> >>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
> >>
> >
>
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