This is a general-purpose tnetstrings library for Ruby.

% gem install tnetstrings

The TNETS module has the same familiar interface as JSON - just TNETS.load(tnetstring) and TNETS.dump(obj) (or obj.to_tnets). To dump arbitrary objects, define #as_tnets. As a convenience, #as_json is used otherwise, if it is defined.

If you have an Enumerable you'd like to stream, call my_enum.stream_tnets(io), and your io will receive one write for every object your enumerable yields.

Tnetstrings (or "tagged netstrings") are a data serialization format that support the same data serialization structures as JSON*. You can read more about it on the tnetstrings site at http://tnetstrings.org, but the main advantage is that all the juicy bits are length-specified instead of delimiter-specified, making it much safer and faster to parse from a socket.

* one not-insignificant difference is that tnetstrings currently have no support for floating-point or decimal numbers. But it may be coming soon.

You will need a couple of things:

• A working C compiler
• Ruby, along with rake and bundler.
• For testing, you will need a few gems, which will install automatically with a call to bundle

To build the project, run rake build. To build and run tests, simply run rake.

Fair warning. This is my first project using C - I'm normally a scripting-language guy. If you are a more experienced developer (i.e. have written a project in C before), I would appreciate it a lot if you could let me know of any ways to improve my code. I'm always looking to improve my craft, and definitely appreciate any and all input.

This library is currently super-alpha - as in not even fully implemented yet. Here are some of the things on my list:

• parsing from a stream rather than an in-memory string (this is what tnetstrings are for, after all)
• handle and test more error cases, and fix a few that I know aren't handled
• separating the parser from the Ruby implementation, in case anyone else wants to use it for another purpose (like embedding into another language, for example).

Fork it and send me a pull request. If you're super-enthusiastic, I might add you as a contributor. I would especially appreciate help with any of the above items.

Enjoy! --Jay