| serialize {base} | R Documentation |
A simple low-level interface for serializing to connections.
serialize(object, connection, ascii = FALSE, refhook = NULL) unserialize(connection, refhook = NULL)
object |
R object to serialize. |
connection |
an open connection or (for serialize)
NULL or (for unserialize) a raw vector
(see ‘Details’). |
ascii |
a logical. If TRUE, an ASCII representation is
written; otherwise (default except for text-mode connections), a
more compact binary one is used. |
refhook |
a hook function for handling reference objects. |
The function serialize writes object to the specified
connection. If connection is NULL then object is
serialized to a raw vector, which is returned as the result of
serialize.
Sharing of reference objects is preserved within the object but not
across separate calls to serialize.
unserialize reads an object (as written by serialize)
from connection or a raw vector.
The refhook functions can be used to customize handling of
non-system reference objects (all external pointers and weak
references, and all environments other than name space and package
environments and .GlobalEnv). The hook function for
serialize should return a raw vector for references it
wants to handle; otherwise it should return NULL. The hook for
unserialize will be called with raw vectors supplied to
serialize and should return an appropriate object.
For a text-mode connection, the default value of ascii is set
to TRUE: only ASCII representations can be written to text-mode
connections and attempting to use ascii = FALSE will throw an
error.
For serialize, NULL unless connection = NULL, when
the result is returned in a raw vector.
For unserialize an R object.
These functions are still experimental. Names, interfaces and
values might change in future versions (and the value of
serialize was changed for R 2.4.0).
A raw vector is limited to 2^31 - 1 bytes, but R objects can exceed this and their serializations will normally be larger than the objects.
x <- serialize(list(1,2,3), NULL) unserialize(x)