[erlang-questions] Erlang term to ASCII

[Brandon Clark]

The non-Erlang app is an in-house configuration management system.  It
stores configuration settings in a SQL database and produces the app.config
file used by my Erlang app on demand via REST interface; the configuration
is delivered as a string in the body of an HTTP response.

My ultimate goal is to rework the Erlang app so that it fetches and applies
most configuration updates automatically without restarting.  For the near
term, that means I have to cope with strings.  In the long term, though, I
have some sway over what the CMS does, provided I'm willing to get my hands
dirty.  ("Don't bring problems -- bring solutions.")  I'm in favor of
Erlang external terms and I think I can sell that solution with BERT and
BERT-RPC.

Regardless of how we transmit the data, we still need a way to confirm that
both systems agree on what the data structure contains.  The current
favored solution is to ask both systems to compute a hash of their data.
 We can normalize the data any way we want in preparation for hashing as
long as both sides do it in exactly the same way.  Since the CMS is already
pretty good at building Erlang terms as strings without newlines or
indentation, I set out to find a way to make Erlang do the same thing.

~BC






On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Bob Ippolito <bob@REDACTED> wrote:

> How is this other system maintaining the deeply-nested Erlang structure?
> How or why is it in text? How does it get rendered without newlines and
> indentation? Why not use a more predictable (less flexible) serialization
> format (erlang term format, JSON, protocol buffers, ...)?
>
> I do not think that this is the best approach. There are many possible
> representations of various tokens as Erlang source code and I would never
> trust two implementations to render it exactly the same way unless I wrote
> both of them. Some tokens that are going to be particularly problematic are
> lists of integers (which may or may not be rendered like strings, with
> various ways to escape), binaries (which may be rendered like strings or
> not), and floating point numbers.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Brandon Clark <a.brandon.clark@REDACTED>wrote:
>
>> I have 2 production systems, one Erlang and one not, both maintaining
>> copies of a large, deeply-nested Erlang data structure.  I need to set up a
>> monitoring script to confirm that both systems are holding identical copies
>> of the data structure.
>>
>> The non-Erlang system is holding an ASCII rendering of the data
>> structure.  Computing an MD5 sum of this string is easy.  If I can get the
>> Erlang system to convert its data structure to a string, I can have it
>> compute an MD5 sum as well and the monitoring is simply a matter of
>> comparing hashes.
>>
>> I'm stuck on the process of converting the Erlang term to a string.
>>
>> Str = io_lib:format("~p", [Data])
>>
>> gives me what I want, except that it includes newlines and indentation
>> that I can't expect the non-Erlang system to have.
>>
>> Str = io_lib:format("~w", [Data])
>>
>> eliminates the newlines and indentation but renders the textual
>> components of Data as lists of integers, guaranteeing the result won't
>> match the non-Erlang system.
>>
>> So the question is, how do I get a "~p"-style rendering of an
>> arbitrarily-large Erlang term *without* newlines and indentation?
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> ~Brandon Clark
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
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