Data/Taxi version 0.91
========================

NAME
    Data::Taxi - Taint-aware, XML-ish data serialization

SYNOPSIS
      use Data::Taxi ':all';
      my ($ob, $str);
  
      $ob = MyClass->new();
      $str = freeze($ob);
      $ob = thaw($str);

INSTALLATION
    Data::Taxi can be installed with the usual routine:

            perl Makefile.PL
            make
            make test
            make install

    You can also just copy Taxi.pm into the Data/ directory of one of your
    library trees.

DESCRIPTION
    Taxi (Taint-Aware XML-Ish) is a data serializer with several handy
    features:

    Taint aware
        Taxi does not force you to trust the data you are serializing. None
        of the input data is executed.

    Human readable
        Taxi produces a human-readable string that simplifies checking the
        output of your objects.

    XML-ish
        While I don't (currently) promise full XML compliance, Taxi produces
        a block of XML-ish data that could probably be read in by other XML
        parsers.

EXPORT
    None by default. freeze and thaw with ':all':

       use Data::Taxi ':all';

Subroutines
  freeze($ob)

    "freeze" serializes a single scalar, hash reference, array reference, or
    scalar reference into an XML string, "freeze" can recurse any number of
    levels of a nested tree and preserve multiple references to the same
    object. Let's look at an example:

            my ($tree, $format, $members, $bool, $mysca);

            # anonymous hash
            $format = {
                    'app'=>'trini',
                    'ver'=>'0.9',
                    'ver'=>'this & that',
            };
        
            # anonymous array
            $members = ['Starflower', 'Mary', 'Paul', 'Hallie', 'Ryan'];
        
            # blessed object
            $bool = Math::BooleanEval->new('whatever');

            # scalar reference (to an anonymous hash, no less)
            $mysca = {'name'=>'miko', 'email'=>'miko@idocs.com', };

            # the whole thing
            $tree = {
                    'dataformat' => $format,
                    'otherdataformat' => $format,
                    'bool' => $bool,
                    'members' => $members,
                    'myscaref' => \$mysca,
            };

            $frozen = freeze($tree);

    "freeze" accepts one object as input. The code above results in the
    following XML-ish string:

       <taxi ver="1.00">
          <hashref id="0">
             <hashref name="otherdataformat" id="1">
                <scalar name="ver" value="this &#38;amp; that"/>
                <scalar name="app" value="trini"/>
             </hashref>
             <scalarref name="myscaref" id="2">
                <hashref id="3">
                   <scalar name="email" value="miko@idocs.com"/>
                   <scalar name="name" value="miko"/>
                </hashref>
             </scalarref>
             <hashref name="bool" id="4" class="Math::BooleanEval">
                <hashref name="blanks" id="5">
                </hashref>
                <scalar name="pos" value="0"/>
                <arrayref name="arr" id="6">
                   <scalar value="whatever"/>
                </arrayref>
                <scalar name="expr" value="whatever"/>
             </hashref>
             <hashref name="dataformat" id="1" redundant="1"/>
             <arrayref name="members" id="7">
                <scalar value="Starflower"/>
                <scalar value="Mary"/>
                <scalar value="Paul"/>
                <scalar value="Hallie"/>
                <scalar value="Ryan"/>
             </arrayref>
          </hashref>
       </taxi>

  thaw

    "thaw" accepts one argument, the serialized data string, and returns a
    single value, the reconstituted data, rebuilding the entire data
    structure including blessed references.

       $tree = thaw($frozen);

Is Taxi data XML?
    Although Taxi's data format is XML-ish, it's not fully compliant to XML
    in all regards. For now, Taxi only promises that it can input its own
    output. The reason I didn't go for full XML compliance is that I wanted
    to keep Taxi as light as possible while achieving its main goal in life:
    pure-perl serialization. XML compliance is not part of that goal. If you
    want to help make Taxi fully XML compliant w/o making it bloated, that's
    cool, drop me an email and we can work together.

TODO
    Tied scalars don't work. The code started getting spaghettish trying to
    implement them, so I decided to use the Asimov method and stop thkining
    about it for a while. Tied hashes and arrays should work fine.

    See how people like it
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
    Copyright (c) 2002 by Miko O'Sullivan. All rights reserved. This program
    is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
    same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any
    kind.

AUTHOR
    Miko O'Sullivan miko@idocs.com

VERSION
     Version 0.90    June 15, 2002
     initial public release
 
     Version 0.91    July 10, 2002
     minor improvment to documentation