Data Formats

Whenever you read something from an URI, one of the built-in parsers is used to make sense of the byte stream received; likewise, whenever you write something, one of the parsers is responsible for converting whatever object or primitive you try to write into a byte stream that can be transmitted and stored at the resource the URI references.

To parse or serialize something manually, you usually use the static methods Parser.parse and Parser.serialize, but it's also possible to manually create a parser and calling its methods directly. Please see Parser for a list of all known parsers and what media types the handle.

Additionally, byte streams may also be transformed by encoders. Like parsers, encoders are usually invoked manually using Encoder.encode and Encoder.decode, but you can instantiate encoders yourself too. See Encoder for a list of available encoders. Encoders are used to handle headers such as content-encoding and transfer-encoding in HTTP, or content-transfer-encoding in MIME.

In the following sections, we'll discuss some of the available parsers and encoders.