How-to emit and parse raw binary data using yaml-cpp

Question

Is it possible to emit and read(parse) binary data(image, file etc)? Like this is shown here: http://yaml.org/type/binary.html How can I do this in yaml-cpp?

Answer 1

As of revision 425, yes! (for emitting)

YAML::Emitter emitter;
emitter << YAML::Binary("Hello, World!", 13);
std::cout << emitter.c_str();

outputs

--- !!binary "SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ=="

The syntax is

YAML::Binary(const char *bytes, std::size_t size);

I wasn't sure how to pass the byte array: char isn't necessarily one byte, so I'm not sure how portable the algorithm is. What format is your byte array typically in?

(The problem is that uint8_t isn't standard C++ yet, so I'm a little worried about using it.)

As for parsing, yaml-cpp will certainly parse the data as a string, but there's no decoding algorithm yet.