Ethereum's RLP encoding implemented as a Serde data format

This code is part of clarity - an effort to implement lightweight Ethereum transaction signing. WIP.

To release new version of serde-rlp do the following steps:

# Do a signed tag for new version with annotation "YYYY-MM-DD, Version v$VERSION"
git tag v1.0.0 -a -s "2018-09-04, Version v1.0.0"
git push origin --follow-tags

You should be able to use this crate same way as you'd use other serialization formats in serde.

The key to serialization is serde_rlp::ser::to_bytes which does the magic.

extern crate serde_rlp;
use serde_rlp::ser::to_bytes;

// Basic key values
let data = vec![vec!["key1", "value1"], vec!["key2", "value2"]];
let bytes = to_bytes(&data).expect("Unable to serialize data");
println!("Serialized data: {:?}", bytes);

To deserialize data back into an object you should use serde_rlp::de::from_bytes.

extern crate serde_rlp;
use serde_rlp::de::from_bytes;

// Deserialize string "abc" encoded as RLP
let foo: String = from_bytes(&[0x83, 0x61, 0x62, 0x63]).unwrap();
println!("{}", foo);

An useful pattern is to deserialize into Vec<Bytes>, which will correctly deserialize elements of a RLP list.