Structured Data Over Pipes

Minimal Solution, That Basically Exists

• Use % format strings. This allows you to select fields.
• Implement %x00 like git log or \0 like find to insert NUL bytes
• Use utf-8 encoding for strings

Advantages:

• Works with xargs -0 (which was meant for find -print0

Other Solutions

• JSON for structured (and proper escaping)
• CSV for tabular data (and proper escaping)
  • Also need a foo.csv_schema for the types. JSON has types in the encoding.
• Provide %#s for a length prefix, for truly binary data. What use cases exist?
  • Alternative: base64 encode
  • Alternative: pass the file system path of the file (could be in memory on tmpfs).
• Netstrings -- for fixed formats