NAME

       Sereal - Fast, compact, powerful binary (de-)serialization

SYNOPSIS

           use Sereal qw(
               get_sereal_decoder
               get_sereal_encoder
               clear_sereal_object_cache

               encode_sereal
               decode_sereal

               read_sereal
               read_sereal_file
               write_sereal
               write_sereal_file

               looks_like_sereal
               scalar_looks_like_sereal

               sereal_encode_with_object
               sereal_decode_with_object
               decode_sereal_with_header_data

               sereal_decode_with_header_with_object
               sereal_decode_only_header_with_object
               sereal_decode_only_header_with_offset_with_object
               sereal_decode_with_header_and_offset_with_object
               sereal_decode_with_offset_with_object

               SRL_UNCOMPRESSED
               SRL_SNAPPY
               SRL_ZLIB
               SRL_ZSTD
           );
           # Note: For performance reasons, you should prefer the OO interface,
           #       or sereal_(en|de)code_with_object over the stateless
           #       encode_sereal/decode_sereal functions.
           #       See the Sereal::Performance documentation for details.

DESCRIPTION

       Sereal is an efficient, compact-output, binary and feature-rich serialization protocol.
       The Perl encoder is implemented as the Sereal::Encoder module, the Perl decoder
       correspondingly as Sereal::Decoder. They are distributed separately to allow for safe
       upgrading without downtime. (Hint: Upgrade the decoder everywhere first, then the
       encoder.)

       This "Sereal" module is a very thin wrapper around both "Sereal::Encoder" and
       "Sereal::Decoder". It depends on both and loads both. So if you have a user of both
       encoder and decoder, it is enough to depend on a particular version of "Sereal" and you'll
       get the most recent released versions of "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder" whose
       version is smaller than or equal to the version of "Sereal" you depend on.

       The protocol specification and many other bits of documentation can be found in the github
       repository. Right now, the specification is at
       <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/sereal_spec.pod>, there is a discussion of
       the design objectives in <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/README.pod>, and
       the output of our benchmarks can be seen at
       <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/wiki/Sereal-Comparison-Graphs>.

   EXPORTED FUNCTIONS
       It is recommended to use the object-oriented interface of "Sereal::Encoder" and
       "Sereal::Decoder" if you care about performance. For detailed performance considerations,
       see Sereal::Performance.

       You can optionally import five functions from "Sereal".  "encode_sereal" is the same
       function as Sereal::Encoder's "encode_sereal" function. "decode_sereal" and
       "looks_like_sereal" are the same as Sereal::Decoder's functions of the same names.
       Finally, you can import the advanced functional interface "sereal_encode_with_object" and
       "sereal_decode_with_object".  Again, see Sereal::Performance for information about those.

       After loading the "Sereal" module, both "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder" are
       guaranteed to be loaded, so you can use their object-oriented interface.

   get_sereal_encoder($OPTSHASH)
       Returns a Sereal::Encoder with the given options. This encoder will be shared by other
       calls to this function.

   get_sereal_decoder($OPTSHASH)
       Returns a Sereal::Decoder with the given options. This encoder will be shared by other
       calls to this function.

   clear_sereal_object_cache
       Clears cache of objects created via get_sereal_encoder() and get_sereal_decoder(). Returns
       the number of objects that were removed from the cache (the sum of both types).

   write_sereal_file($FILENAME,$STRUCT,$APPEND,$OPTS)
       Write a sereal packet to $FILENAME. See Sereal::Encoder::encode_to_file().

   write_sereal($FILENAME,$STRUCT,$APPEND,$OPTS)
       alias for write_sereal_file()

   read_sereal_file($FILENAME,$OPTS,$ROOT)
       Read a sereal packet from a file. See Sereal::Decoder::decode_from_file().

   read_sereal($FILENAME,$OPTS,$ROOT)
       alias for read_sereal_file()

BUGS, CONTACT AND SUPPORT

       For reporting bugs, please use the github bug tracker at
       <http://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/issues>.

       For support and discussion of Sereal, there are two Google Groups:

       Announcements around Sereal (extremely low volume):
       <https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sereal-announce>

       Sereal development list: <https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sereal-dev>

AUTHOR

       Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org>

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

       This module was originally developed for Booking.com.  With approval from Booking.com,
       this module was generalized and published on CPAN, for which the authors would like to
       express their gratitude.

LICENSE

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2014 by Steffen Mueller