Skip to main content

CBOR Format

Description​

CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) is a binary data format inspired by JSON. It's designed to be more compact and efficient than JSON while maintaining similar data structures. CBOR is an IETF standard (RFC 7049).

File Extensions​

  • .cbor - CBOR files

Implementation Details​

Reading​

The CBOR implementation:

  • Uses cbor2 or cbor library for decoding
  • Supports reading single objects or arrays
  • Converts CBOR data to Python objects
  • Handles nested structures

Writing​

Writing support:

  • Encodes Python objects to CBOR format
  • Writes binary CBOR data
  • Supports nested structures

Key Features​

  • Binary format: More compact than JSON
  • JSON-like: Similar data structures to JSON
  • Nested data: Supports complex nested structures
  • Type preservation: Maintains data types
  • Standard format: IETF standard (RFC 7049)

Usage​

from iterable import open_iterable

# Basic reading
source = open_iterable('data.cbor')
for row in source:
    print(row)
source.close()

# Writing
dest = open_iterable('output.cbor', mode='w')
dest.write({'name': 'John', 'age': 30})
dest.close()

Parameters​

No specific parameters required.

Limitations​

  1. Dependency: Requires cbor2 or cbor package
  2. Binary format: Not human-readable
  3. File structure: Expects single object or array of objects
  4. Memory usage: Entire file may be loaded into memory

Compression Support​

CBOR files can be compressed with all supported codecs:

  • GZip (.cbor.gz)
  • BZip2 (.cbor.bz2)
  • LZMA (.cbor.xz)
  • LZ4 (.cbor.lz4)
  • ZIP (.cbor.zip)
  • Brotli (.cbor.br)
  • ZStandard (.cbor.zst)

Use Cases​

  • IoT devices: Efficient data exchange for IoT
  • APIs: Compact API responses
  • Data storage: Efficient binary storage
  • Embedded systems: Resource-constrained environments