XDR? (was Re: is there a safe marshaler?)

[Irmen de Jong]

PA wrote:
> 
> On Feb 10, 2005, at 15:01, Irmen de Jong wrote:
> 
>> Is xdrlib the only option?
>> I would expect that it is fast and safe because
>> it (the xdr spec) has been around for so long.
> 
> 
> XDR? Like Sun's "XDR: External Data Representation standard"?
> 
> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1014.html
> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1832.html

Not "like", but "the".
Or at least, a subset. (the xdrlib module documentation says
"It supports most of the data types described in the RFC").


> How does XDR copes with Unicode these days?

Not directly, it seems that you have to encode
your unicode strings yourself first .


> Alternatively, perhaps there is a ASN.1 DER library in python?
> 
> http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/standards/index.htm


I don't know. Is there?


PS the xdr format is not self-describing in the way that
marshal and pickle streams are. That is a big limitiation
for what I need it for so xdr seems to drop off my radar.
Is an ASN.1 stream self-describing?

--Irmen