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
             write_sereal
             read_sereal
             looks_like_sereal
             sereal_encode_with_object
             sereal_decode_with_object
             decode_sereal_with_header_data
             scalar_looks_like_sereal
             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
           );
           # 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.

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

   read_sereal($FILENAME,$OPTS)
       Read a sereal packet from a file. See Sereal::Decoder::decode_from_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