serialise-js

An extensible library for serialising JavaScript data

Installation

npm install serialise-js --save

Usage

Serialise any variable:

var serialise = require('serialise-js');
serialise({
  foo: [1, 2, 3],
  bar: { key: 'value' },
  "the key": "the value"
});

Returns:

{
  foo: [
    1,
    2,
    3
  ],
  bar: {
    key: 'value'
  },
  'the key': 'the value'
}

Options

You can pass in an options object as a second argument to serialise:

• indent - Set the characters used for a single indent, default 2 spaces
• doubleQuotes - Set this to true to serialise strings with double quotes
• inline - Set this to true to serialise object and arrays inline, set to a number to serialise inline below lines of this length

Example:

var input = { foo: ['bar', { zim: 'gir' }] };
serialise(input, { indent: ' ', doubleQuotes: true, inline: 25 });

Returns:

{
 foo: [
  "bar",
  { zim: "gir" }
 ]
}

Caveats

• Recursive instances of objects and arrays are replaced by the string '[Circular]'
• Functions are serialised, but this may not be valid javascript if they are native functions or use variables from another scope, you can prevent this by overriding serialise.function e.g. serialise.function = function() { return 'null'; }

Extending

It's easy to extend and modify the library.

Say you want to support serialisation of the popular moment.js library. By default moment will be serialised as a normal object, which is pretty gross. We can allow it to serialise as it would be defined (or close enough).

1. The first thing we need to do is create a serialisation method, these are all exposed on the serialise function (e.g. serialise.string). We can just add another one:

   serialise.moment = function(moment, options) {
     return 'moment(' +serialise.string(moment.format(), options) + ')';
   };
   

   This uses serialise.string to serialise the formatted date string.

2. Next we need to create a type matching function to detect this type, and add it to serialise.types:

   serialise.types.moment = function(val) {
     return val && val._isAMomentObject;
   };
   

3. Finally we need to add this type to the typeOrder array, which defines the order in this the types are checked, in our case we need it to be checked before object, so we can just add it to the start of the array:

   serialise.typeOrder.unshift('moment');
   

Now we can use it:

console.log(serialise({ time: moment('2015-01-01') }));

Which outputs:

{
  time: moment('2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00')
}

This could be neater, still, but you get the idea.