In general the process of taking some convoluted internal data structure and generating a linear representation of it that can be used to reconstruct the internal data structures at a later time. This is the fundament underlying persistence and transfer of complex data over channels.

See Also  edit

data format

Serializing a Bitmap

Serializing a Photo

Serializing a Canvas widget

Serializing a Widget

Serializing a Text widget

A Widget Serializer

Deep copy and persistence of a BWidget's Tree

Dumping interpreter state

procs, globals, interp aliases, package requirements

Serializing TclOO objects

RS notes that most serialization worries from other languages are no problem in Tcl where everything is a string ...

Great that be doable, better that be done (where worries go).

TV: But in various cases it should be so much simpler... Agreed, though. - RS: This page lists only the nontrivial cases. Other languages will have to worry about how to serialize an integer, a double, a list, an array... which Tcl all provides with built-in string reps, as specially simple case of serialization.

escargo 2004-02-21: This could also be seen as an implementation of the Memento design pattern.

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