What's your data serialisation format of choice?

Question

I'm interested to see who favours more obscure data serialisation formats over the more obvious ones (JSON, XML and Yaml). What do you tend to use? What syntax do you prefer?

Answer 1

It really depends on the requirements:

• Do you need portability? If so, between which platforms?
• Is speed more important than size, or vice versa?
• Is it important to use some sort of international standard container format (such as XML, even if the details aren't standardised)?
• What sort of backward/forward compatibility do you need?

Personally I'm a fan of Protocol Buffers, but then I'm biased as not only a Google employee, but one who's ported PB to C#...

Answer 2

Some are very fond of ASN.1 (you know who you are).

It is less human readable than XML, but more compact.

An example, after bit-encoding:

30 13 02 01 05 16 0e 41  6e 79 62 6f 64 79

This assumes the sender and receiver already knows about the structure of the data.

(Before bit-encoding it is:

myQuestion FooQuestion ::= {
    trackingNumber     5,
    question           "Anybody there?"
}

)