Serializable

Fast and memory-safe* table serialization library

*Best effort was made to ensure proper handling of serializing and unserializing very large tables but for obvious reasons I can't guarantee that you won't run into out-of-memory errors, particularly when loading tables with size ≈ ½system memory

Caveats

1. No cycles in table structure (nested tables are okay, but there's no cycle detection)
2. No userdata/coroutines/function as keys/values (only serializable values are strings, numbers, booleans and other tables)
3. Serialized format is (as of now) not as compact as it ought to be (i.e. there are some optimizations which could be made)

Usage

You either need a stream (table which supports :write for using it with serializable.serialize or :read for serializable.unserialize, usually a file handle) or you can let the library do the file handling for you as well, with you only providing the filename:

  local serializable = require("serializable")
  serializable.serializeToFile(table_to_serialize, "/home/serialized_table.txt")
  local loaded_table = serializable.unserializeFromFile("/home/serialized_table.txt")