A BERT (Binary ERlang Term) serialization library for Ruby. It can encode Ruby objects into BERT format and decode BERT binaries into Ruby objects.

See the BERT specification at bert-rpc.org.

Instances of the following Ruby classes will be automatically converted to the proper simple BERT type:

• Fixnum
• Float
• Symbol
• Array
• String

Instances of the following Ruby classes will be automatically converted to the proper complex BERT type:

• NilClass
• TrueClass
• FalseClass
• Hash
• Time
• Regexp

To designate tuples, simply prefix an Array literal with a t or use the BERT::Tuple class:

t[:foo, [1, 2, 3]]
BERT::Tuple[:foo, [1, 2, 3]]

Both of these will be converted to (in Erlang syntax):

{foo, [1, 2, 3]}

gem install bert -s http://gemcutter.org

require 'bert'

bert = BERT.encode(t[:user, {:name => 'TPW', :nick => 'mojombo'}])
# => "\203h\002d\000\004userh\002d\000\004dictl\000\000\000\002h\002d
      \000\004namem\000\000\000\003TPWh\002d\000\004nickm\000\000\000
      \amojomboj"

BERT.decode(bert)
# => t[:user, {:name=>"TPW", :nick=>"mojombo"}]

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright (c) 2009 Tom Preston-Werner. See LICENSE for details.