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Sereal::Encoder(3pm)  User Contributed Perl Documentation Sereal::Encoder(3pm)

NAME
       Sereal::Encoder - Fast, compact, powerful binary serialization

SYNOPSIS
         use Sereal::Encoder qw(encode_sereal sereal_encode_with_object);

         my $encoder = Sereal::Encoder->new({...options...});
         my $out = $encoder->encode($structure);

         # alternatively the functional interface:
         $out = sereal_encode_with_object($encoder, $structure);

         # much slower functional interface with no persistent objects:
         $out = encode_sereal($structure, {... options ...});

DESCRIPTION
       This library implements an efficient, compact-output, and feature-rich
       serializer using a binary protocol called Sereal.  Its sister module
       Sereal::Decoder implements a decoder for this format.  The two are
       released separately to allow for independent and safer upgrading.  If
       you care greatly about performance, consider reading the
       Sereal::Performance documentation after finishing this document.

       The Sereal protocol version emitted by this encoder implementation is
       currently protocol version 4 by default.

       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>.  For
       more information on getting the best performance out of Sereal, have a
       look at the "PERFORMANCE" section below.

CLASS METHODS
   new
       Constructor. Optionally takes a hash reference as first parameter. This
       hash reference may contain any number of options that influence the
       behaviour of the encoder.

       Currently, the following options are recognized, none of them are on by
       default.

       compress

       If this option provided and true, compression of the document body is
       enabled.  As of Sereal version 4, three different compression
       techniques are supported and can be enabled by setting "compress" to
       the respective named constants (exportable from the "Sereal::Encoder"
       module): Snappy (named constant: "SRL_SNAPPY"), Zlib ("SRL_ZLIB") and
       Zstd ("SRL_ZSTD").  For your convenience, there is also a
       "SRL_UNCOMPRESSED" constant.

       If this option is set, then the Snappy-related options below are
       ignored. They are otherwise recognized for compatibility only.

       compress_threshold

       The size threshold (in bytes) of the uncompressed output below which
       compression is not even attempted even if enabled.  Defaults to one
       kilobyte (1024 bytes). Set this to 0 and "compress" to a
       non-"SRL_UNCOMPRESSED" value to always attempt to compress.  Note that
       the document will not be compressed if the resulting size will be
       bigger than the original size (even if "compress_threshold" is 0).

       compress_level

       If Zlib or Zstd compressions are used, then this option will set a
       compression level: Zlib uses range from 1 (fastest) to 9 (best).
       Defaults to 6. Zstd uses range from 1 (fastest) to 22 (best). Default
       is 3.

       snappy

       See also the "compress" option. This option is provided only for
       compatibility with Sereal V1.

       If set, the main payload of the Sereal document will be compressed
       using Google's Snappy algorithm. This can yield anywhere from no effect
       to significant savings on output size at rather low run time cost.  If
       in doubt, test with your data whether this helps or not.

       The decoder (version 0.04 and up) will know how to handle Snappy-
       compressed Sereal documents transparently.

       Note: The "snappy_incr" and "snappy" options are identical in Sereal
       protocol v2 and up (so by default). If using an older protocol version
       (see "protocol_version" and "use_protocol_v1" options below) to emit
       Sereal V1 documents, this emits non-incrementally decodable documents.
       See "snappy_incr" in those cases.

       snappy_incr

       See also the "compress" option. This option is provided only for
       compatibility with Sereal V1.

       Same as the "snappy" option for default operation (that is in Sereal v2
       or up).

       In Sereal V1, enables a version of the Snappy protocol which is
       suitable for incremental parsing of packets. See also the "snappy"
       option above for more details.

       snappy_threshold

       See also the "compress" option. This option is provided only for
       compatibility with Sereal V1.

       This option is a synonym for the "compress_threshold" option, but only
       if Snappy compression is enabled.

       croak_on_bless

       If this option is set, then the encoder will refuse to serialize
       blessed references and throw an exception instead.

       This can be important because blessed references can mean executing a
       destructor on a remote system or generally executing code based on
       data.

       See also "no_bless_objects" to skip the blessing of objects.  When both
       flags are set, "croak_on_bless" has a higher precedence then
       "no_bless_objects".

       freeze_callbacks

       This option was introduced in Sereal v2 and needs a Sereal v2 decoder.

       If this option is set, the encoder will check for and possibly invoke
       the "FREEZE" method on any object in the input data. An object that was
       serialized using its "FREEZE" method will have its corresponding "THAW"
       class method called during deserialization. The exact semantics are
       documented below under "FREEZE/THAW CALLBACK MECHANISM".

       Beware that using this functionality means a significant slowdown for
       object serialization. Even when serializing objects without a "FREEZE"
       method, the additional method look up will cost a small amount of
       runtime.  Yes, "Sereal::Encoder" is so fast that this may make a
       difference.

       no_bless_objects

       If this option is set, then the encoder will serialize blessed
       references without the bless information and provide plain data
       structures instead.

       See also the "croak_on_bless" option above for more details.

       undef_unknown

       If set, unknown/unsupported data structures will be encoded as "undef"
       instead of throwing an exception.

       Mutually exclusive with "stringify_unknown".  See also "warn_unknown"
       below.

       stringify_unknown

       If set, unknown/unsupported data structures will be stringified and
       encoded as that string instead of throwing an exception. The
       stringification may cause a warning to be emitted by perl.

       Mutually exclusive with "undef_unknown".  See also "warn_unknown"
       below.

       warn_unknown

       Only has an effect if "undef_unknown" or "stringify_unknown" are
       enabled.

       If set to a positive integer, any unknown/unsupported data structure
       encountered will emit a warning. If set to a negative integer, it will
       warn for unsupported data structures just the same as for a positive
       value with one exception: For blessed, unsupported items that have
       string overloading, we silently stringify without warning.

       max_recursion_depth

       "Sereal::Encoder" is recursive. If you pass it a Perl data structure
       that is deeply nested, it will eventually exhaust the C stack.
       Therefore, there is a limit on the depth of recursion that is accepted.
       It defaults to 10000 nested calls. You may choose to override this
       value with the "max_recursion_depth" option. Beware that setting it too
       high can cause hard crashes, so only do that if you KNOW that it is
       safe to do so.

       Do note that the setting is somewhat approximate. Setting it to 10000
       may break at somewhere between 9997 and 10003 nested structures
       depending on their types.

       canonical

       Enable all options which are related to producing canonical output, so
       that two strucutures with similar contents produce the same serialized
       form.

       See the caveats elsewhere in this document about producing canonical
       output.

       Currently sets the default for the following parameters:
       "canonical_refs" and "sort_keys". If the option is explicitly set then
       this setting is ignored.  More options may be added in the future.

       You are warned that use of this option may incur additional performance
       penalties in a future release by enabling other options than those
       listed here.

       canonical_refs

       Normally "Sereal::Encoder" will ARRAYREF and HASHREF tags when the item
       contains less than 16 items, and and is not referenced more than once.
       This flag will override this optimization and use a standard REFN ARRAY
       style tag output. This is primarily useful for producing canonical
       output and for testing Sereal itself.

       See "CANONICAL REPRESENTATION" for why you might want to use this, and
       for the various caveats involved.

       sort_keys

       Normally "Sereal::Encoder" will output hashes in whatever order is
       convenient, generally that used by perl to actually store the hash, or
       whatever order was returned by a tied hash.

       If this option is enabled then the Encoder will sort the keys before
       outputting them. It uses more memory, and is quite a bit slower than
       the default.

       Generally speaking this should mean that a hash and a copy should
       produce the same output. Nevertheless the user is warned that Perl has
       a way of "morphing" variables on use, and some of its rules are a
       little arcane (for instance utf8 keys), and so two hashes that might
       appear to be the same might still produce different output as far as
       Sereal is concerned.

       As of 3.006_007 (prerelease candidate for 3.007) the sort order has
       been changed to the following: order by length of keys (in bytes)
       ascending, then by byte order of the raw underlying string, then by
       utf8ness, with non-utf8 first. This order was chosen because it is the
       most efficient to implement, both in terms of memory and time. This
       sort order is enabled when sort_keys is set to 1.

       You may also produce output in Perl "cmp" order, by setting sort_keys
       to 2.  And for backwards compatibility you may also produce output in
       reverse Perl "cmp" order by setting sort_keys to 3. Prior to 3.006_007
       this was the only sort order possible, although it was not explicitly
       defined what it was.

       Note that comparatively speaking both of the "cmp" sort orders are slow
       and memory inefficient. Unless you have a really good reason stick to
       the default which is fast and as lean as possible.

       Unless you are concerned with "cross process canonical representation"
       then it doesn't matter what option you choose.

       See "CANONICAL REPRESENTATION" for why you might want to use this, and
       for the various caveats involved.

       no_shared_hashkeys

       When the "no_shared_hashkeys" option is set to a true value, then the
       encoder will disable the detection and elimination of repeated hash
       keys. This only has an effect for serializing structures containing
       hashes.  By skipping the detection of repeated hash keys, performance
       goes up a bit, but the size of the output can potentially be much
       larger.

       Do not disable this unless you have a reason to.

       dedupe_strings

       If this is option is enabled/true then Sereal will use a hash to encode
       duplicates of strings during serialization efficiently using (internal)
       backreferences. This has a performance and memory penalty during
       encoding so it defaults to off.  On the other hand, data structures
       with many duplicated strings will see a significant reduction in the
       size of the encoded form. Currently only strings longer than 3
       characters will be deduped, however this may change in the future.

       Note that Sereal will perform certain types of deduping automatically
       even without this option. In particular class names and hash keys (see
       also the "no_shared_hashkeys" setting) are deduped regardless of this
       option. Only enable this if you have good reason to believe that there
       are many duplicated strings as values in your data structure.

       Use of this option does not require an upgraded decoder (this option
       was added in Sereal::Encoder 0.32). The deduping is performed in such a
       way that older decoders should handle it just fine.  In other words,
       the output of a Sereal decoder should not depend on whether this option
       was used during encoding. See also below: aliased_dedupe_strings.

       aliased_dedupe_strings

       This is an advanced option that should be used only after fully
       understanding its ramifications.

       This option enables a mode of operation that is similar to
       dedupe_strings and if both options are set, aliased_dedupe_strings
       takes precedence.

       The behaviour of aliased_dedupe_strings differs from dedupe_strings in
       that the duplicate occurrences of strings are emitted as Perl language
       level aliases instead of as Sereal-internal backreferences. This means
       that using this option actually produces a different output data
       structure when decoding. The upshot is that with this option, the
       application using (decoding) the data may save a lot of memory in some
       situations but at the cost of potential action at a distance due to the
       aliasing.

       Beware: The test suite currently does not cover this option as well as
       it probably should. Patches welcome.

       use_standard_double

       This option can be used to force Perls built with uselongdouble or
       quadmath to use DOUBLE instead of the native floating point. This can
       be helpful interoperating with Perls which do not support larger sized
       floats. Note that "uselongdouble" means different things in different
       places, so this option may be helpful for such builds. We do not enable
       this option by default for backwards compatibility reasons, and because
       doing so would lose precision.

       protocol_version

       Specifies the version of the Sereal protocol to emit. Valid are
       integers between 1 and the current version. If not specified, the most
       recent protocol version will be used. See also "use_protocol_v1":

       It is strongly advised to use the latest protocol version outside of
       migration periods.

       use_protocol_v1

       This option is deprecated in favour of the "protocol_version" option
       (see above).

       If set, the encoder will emit Sereal documents following protocol
       version 1.  This is strongly discouraged except for temporary
       compatibility/migration purposes.

INSTANCE METHODS
   encode
       Given a Perl data structure, serializes that data structure and returns
       a binary string that can be turned back into the original data
       structure by Sereal::Decoder. The method expects a data structure to
       serialize as first argument, optionally followed by a header data
       structure.

       A header is intended for embedding small amounts of meta data, such as
       routing information, in a document that allows users to avoid
       deserializing main body needlessly.

   encode_to_file
           Sereal::Encoder->encode_to_file($file,$data,$append);
           $encoder->encode_to_file($file,$data,$append);

       Encode the data specified and write it the named file.  If $append is
       true then the written data is appended to any existing data, otherwise
       any existing data will be overwritten.  Dies if any errors occur during
       writing the encoded data.

EXPORTABLE FUNCTIONS
   sereal_encode_with_object
       The functional interface that is equivalent to using "encode". Takes an
       encoder object reference as first argument, followed by a data
       structure and optional header to serialize.

       This functional interface is marginally faster than the OO interface
       since it avoids method resolution overhead and, on sufficiently modern
       Perl versions, can usually avoid subroutine call overhead.

   encode_sereal
       The functional interface that is equivalent to using "new" and
       "encode".  Expects a data structure to serialize as first argument,
       optionally followed by a hash reference of options (see documentation
       for "new()").

       This function cannot be used for encoding a data structure with a
       header.  See "encode_sereal_with_header_data".

       This functional interface is significantly slower than the OO interface
       since it cannot reuse the encoder object.

   encode_sereal_with_header_data
       The functional interface that is equivalent to using "new" and
       "encode".  Expects a data structure and a header to serialize as first
       and second arguments, optionally followed by a hash reference of
       options (see documentation for "new()").

       This functional interface is significantly slower than the OO interface
       since it cannot reuse the encoder object.

PERFORMANCE
       See Sereal::Performance for detailed considerations on performance
       tuning. Let it just be said that:

       If you care about performance at all, then use
       "sereal_encode_with_object" or the OO interface instead of
       "encode_sereal". It's a significant difference in performance if you
       are serializing small data structures.

       The exact performance in time and space depends heavily on the data
       structure to be serialized. Often there is a trade-off between space
       and time. If in doubt, do your own testing and most importantly ALWAYS
       TEST WITH REAL DATA. If you care purely about speed at the expense of
       output size, you can use the "no_shared_hashkeys" option for a small
       speed-up. If you need smaller output at the cost of higher CPU load and
       more memory used during encoding/decoding, try the "dedupe_strings"
       option and enable Snappy compression.

       For ready-made comparison scripts, see the author_tools/bench.pl and
       author_tools/dbench.pl programs that are part of this distribution.
       Suffice to say that this library is easily competitive in both time and
       space efficiency with the best alternatives.

FREEZE/THAW CALLBACK MECHANISM
       Some objects do not lend themselves naturally to naive perl
       datastructure level serialization. For instance XS code might use a
       hidden structure that would not get serialized, or an object may
       contain volatile data like a filehandle that would not be reconstituted
       properly. To support cases like this "Sereal" supports a FREEZE and
       THAW api. When objects are serialized their FREEZE method is asked for
       a replacement representation, and when objects are deserialized their
       THAW method is asked to convert that replacement back to something
       useful.

       This mechanism is enabled using the "freeze_callbacks" option of the
       encoder.  It is inspired by the equivalent mechanism in CBOR::XS. The
       general mechanism is documented in the A GENERIC OBJECT SERIALIATION
       PROTOCOL section of Types::Serialiser. Similar to CBOR using "CBOR",
       Sereal uses the string "Sereal" as a serializer identifier for the
       callbacks.

       Here is a contrived example of a class implementing the "FREEZE" /
       "THAW" mechanism.

         package
           File;

         use Moo;

         has 'path' => (is => 'ro');
         has 'fh' => (is => 'rw');

         # open file handle if necessary and return it
         sub get_fh {
           my $self = shift;
           # This could also be done with fancier Moo(se) syntax
           my $fh = $self->fh;
           if (not $fh) {
             open $fh, "<", $self->path or die $!;
             $self->fh($fh);
           }
           return $fh;
         }

         sub FREEZE {
           my ($self, $serializer) = @_;
           # Could switch on $serializer here: JSON, CBOR, Sereal, ...
           # But this case is so simple that it will work with ALL of them.
           # Do not try to serialize our file handle! Path will be enough
           # to recreate.
           return $self->path;
         }

         sub THAW {
           my ($class, $serializer, $data) = @_;
           # Turn back into object.
           return $class->new(path => $data);
         }

       Why is the "FREEZE"/"THAW" mechanism important here? Our contrived
       "File" class may contain a file handle which can't be serialized. So
       "FREEZE" not only returns just the path (which is more compact than
       encoding the actual object contents), but it strips the file handle
       which can be lazily reopened on the other side of the
       serialization/deserialization pipe.  But this example also shows that a
       naive implementation can easily end up with subtle bugs. A file handle
       itself has state (position in file, etc).  Thus the deserialization in
       the above example won't accurately reproduce the original state. It
       can't, of course, if it's deserialized in a different environment
       anyway.

THREAD-SAFETY
       "Sereal::Encoder" is thread-safe on Perl's 5.8.7 and higher. This means
       "thread-safe" in the sense that if you create a new thread, all
       "Sereal::Encoder" objects will become a reference to undef in the new
       thread. This might change in a future release to become a full clone of
       the encoder object.

CANONICAL REPRESENTATION
       You might want to compare two data structures by comparing their
       serialized byte strings.  For that to work reliably the serialization
       must take extra steps to ensure that identical data structures are
       encoded into identical serialized byte strings (a so-called "canonical
       representation").

       Unfortunately in Perl there is no such thing as a "canonical
       representation".  Most people are interested in "structural
       equivalence" but even that is less well defined than most people think.
       For instance in the following example:

           my $array1= [ 0, 0 ];
           my $array2= do {
               my $zero= 0;
               sub{ \@_ }->($zero,$zero);
           };

       the question of whether $array1 is structurally equivalent to $array2
       is a subjective one. Sereal for instance would NOT consider them
       equivalent but "Test::Deep" would.  There are many examples of this in
       Perl. Simply stringifying a number technically changes the scalar.
       Storable would notice this, but Sereal generally would not.

       Despite this as of 3.002 the Sereal encoder supports a "canonical"
       option which will make a "best effort" attempt at producing a canonical
       representation of a data structure.  This mode is actually a
       combination of several other modes which may also be enabled
       independently, and as and when we add new options to the encoder that
       would assist in this regard then the "canonical" will also enable them.
       These options may come with a performance penalty so care should be
       taken to read the Changes file and test the performance implications
       when upgrading a system that uses this option.

       It is important to note that using canonical representation to
       determine if two data structures are different is subject to false-
       positives. If two Sereal encodings are identical you can generally
       assume that the two data structures are functionally equivalent from
       the point of view of normal Perl code (XS code might disagree). However
       if two Sereal encodings differ the data structures may actually be
       functionally equivalent.  In practice it seems the the false-positive
       rate is low, but your milage may vary.

       Some of the issues with producing a true canonical representation are
       outlined below:

       Sereal doesn't order the hash keys by default.
           This can be enabled via the "sort_keys", which is itself enabled by
           "canonical" option.

       Sereal output is sensitive to refcounts
           This can be somewhat mitigated by the use of "canonical_refs", see
           above.

       There are multiple valid Sereal documents that you can produce for the
       same Perl data structure.
           Just sorting hash keys is not enough.  Some of the reasons are
           outlined below. These issues are especially relevant when
           considering language interoperability.

           PAD bytes
               A trivial example is PAD bytes which mean nothing and are
               skipped. They mostly exist for encoder optimizations to prevent
               certain nasty backtracking situations from becoming O(n) at the
               cost of one byte of output. An explicit canonical mode would
               have to outlaw them (or add more of them) and thus require a
               much more complicated implementation of refcount/weakref
               handing in the encoder while at the same time causing some
               operations to go from O(1) to a full memcpy of everything after
               the point of where we backtracked to. Nasty.

           COPY tag
               Another example is COPY. The COPY tag indicates that the next
               element is an identical copy of a previous element (which is
               itself forbidden from including COPY's other than for class
               names). COPY is purely internal. The Perl/XS implementation
               uses it to share hash keys and class names. One could use it
               for other strings (theoretically), but doesn't for time-
               efficiency reasons. We'd have to outlaw the use of this
               (significant) optimization of canonicalization.

           REF representation
               Sereal represents a reference to an array as a sequence of tags
               which, in its simplest form, reads REF, ARRAY $array_length
               TAG1 TAG2 ....  The separation of "REF" and "ARRAY" is
               necessary to properly implement all of Perl's referencing and
               aliasing semantics correctly. Quite frequently, however, your
               array is only referenced once and plainly so. If it's also at
               most 15 elements long, Sereal optimizes all of the "REF" and
               "ARRAY" tags, as well as the length into a special one byte
               ARRAYREF tag. This is a very significant optimization for
               common cases. This, however, does mean that most arrays up to
               15 elements could be represented in two different, yet
               perfectly valid forms. ARRAYREF would have to be outlawed for a
               properly canonical form. The exact same logic applies to HASH
               vs. HASHREF. This behavior can be overridden by the
               "canonical_refs" option, which disables use of HASHREF and
               ARRAYREF.

           Numeric representation
               Similar to how Sereal can represent arrays and hashes in a full
               and a compact form. For small integers (between -16 and +15
               inclusive), Sereal emits only one byte including the encoding
               of the type of data. For larger integers, it can use either
               variants (positive only) or zigzag encoding, which can also
               represent negative numbers. For a canonical mode, the space
               optimizations would have to be turned off and it would have to
               be explicitly specified whether variant or zigzag encoding is
               to be used for encoding positive integers.

               Perl may choose to retain multiple representations of a scalar.
               Specifically, it can convert integers, floating point numbers,
               and strings on the fly and will aggressively cache the results.
               Normally, it remembers which of the representations can be
               considered canonical, that means, which can be used to recreate
               the others reliably. For example, 0 and "0" can both be
               considered canonical since they naturally transform into each
               other. Beyond intrinsic ambiguity, there are ways to trick Perl
               into allowing a single scalar to have distinct string, integer,
               and floating point representations that are all flagged as
               canonical, but can't be transformed into each other. These are
               the so-called dualvars. Sereal cannot represent dualvars (and
               that's a good thing).

               Floating point values can appear to be the same but serialize
               to different byte strings due to insignificant 'noise' in the
               floating point representation. Sereal supports different
               floating point precisions and will generally choose the most
               compact that can represent your floating point number
               correctly.

           There's also a few cases where Sereal will produce different
           documents for values that you might think are the same thing,
           because if you e.g. compared them with "eq" or "==" in perl itself
           would think they were equivalent. However for the purposes of
           serialization they're not the same value.

           A good example of these cases is where Test::Deep and Sereal's
           canonical mode differ. We have tests for some of these cases in
           t/030_canonical_vs_test_deep.t. Here's the issues we've noticed so
           far:

           Sereal considers ASCII strings with the UTF-8 flag to be different
           from the same string without the UTF-8 flag
               Consider:

                   my $language_code = "en";

               v.s.:

                   my $language_code = "en";
                   utf8::upgrade($en);

               Sereal's canonical mode will encode these strings differently,
               as it should, since the UTF-8 flag will be passed along on
               interpolation.

               But this can be confusing if you're just getting some user-
               supplied ASCII strings that you may inadvertently toggle the
               UTF-8 flag on, e.g. because you're comparing an ASCII value in
               a database to a value submitted in a UTF-8 web form.

           Sereal will encode strings that look like numbers as strings,
           unless they've been used in numeric context
               I.e. these values will be encoded differently, respectively:

                   my $IV_x = "12345";
                   my $IV_y = "12345" + 0;
                   my $NV_x = "12.345";
                   my $NV_y = "12.345" + 0;

               But as noted above something like Test::Deep will consider
               these to be the same thing.

           We might produce certain aggressive flags to the canonical mode in
           the future to deal with this. For the cases noted above some
           combination of turning the UTF-8 flag on on all strings, or
           stripping it from strings that have it but are ASCII-only would
           "work", similarly we could scan strings to see if they match
           "looks_like_number()" and if so numify them.

           This would produce output that either would be a lot bigger (having
           to encode all numbers as strings), or would be more expensive to
           generate (having to scan strings for numeric or non-ASCII context),
           and for some cases like the UTF-8 flag munging wouldn't be suitable
           for general use outside of canonicialization.

       Often, people don't actually care about "canonical" in the strict sense
       required for real identity checking. They just require a best-effort
       sort of thing for caching. But it's a slippery slope!

       In a nutshell, the "canonical" option may be sufficient for an
       application which is simply serializing a cache key, and thus there's
       little harm in an occasional false-negative, but think carefully before
       applying Sereal in other use-cases.

KNOWN ISSUES
       Strings Or Numbers
           Perl does not make a strong distinction between strings and
           numbers, and from an internal point of view it can be difficult to
           tell what the "right" representation is for a given variable.

           Sereal tries to not be lossy. So if it detects that the string
           value of a var, and the numeric value are different it will
           generally round trip the *string* value. This means that "special"
           strings often used in Perl function returns, like "0 but true", and
           "0e0", will round trip in a way that their normal Perl semantics
           are preserved. However this also means that "non canonical" values,
           like " 100 ", which will numify as 100 without warnings, will round
           trip as their string values.

           Perl also has some operators, the binary operators, ^, | and &,
           which do different things depending on whether their arguments had
           been used in numeric context as the following examples show:

               perl -le'my $x="1"; $i=int($x); print unpack "H*", $x ^ "1"'
               30

               perl -le'my $x="1"; print unpack "H*", $x ^ "1"'
               00

               perl -le'my $x=" 1 "; $i=int($x); print unpack "H*", $x ^ "1"'
               30

               perl -le'my $x=" 1 "; print unpack "H*", $x ^ "1"'
               113120

           Sereal currently cannot round trip this property properly.

           An extreme case of this problem is that of "dualvars", which can be
           created using the Scalar::Util::dualvar() function. This function
           allows one to create variables which have string and integer values
           which are completely unrelated to each other.  Sereal currently
           will choose the *string* value when it detects these items.

           It is possible that a future release of the protocol will fix these
           issues.

       Booleans
           As of Perl 5.36 and protocol version 5 Sereal now supports
           booleans. The new tags SRL_HDR_YES and SRL_HDR_NO now represent
           perl bools, the old special variables that SRL_HDR_TRUE and
           SRL_HDR_FALSE may still be generated, but beyond being readonly
           these are equivalent to SRL_HDR_YES and SRL_HDR_NO.

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>

AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
       Yves Orton <demerphq@gmail.com>

       Damian Gryski

       Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org>

       Rafaël Garcia-Suarez

       Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avar@cpan.org>

       Tim Bunce

       Daniel Dragan <bulkdd@cpan.org> (Windows support and bugfixes)

       Zefram

       Borislav Nikolov

       Ivan Kruglov <ivan.kruglov@yahoo.com>

       Some inspiration and code was taken from Marc Lehmann's excellent
       JSON::XS module due to obvious overlap in problem domain. Thank you!

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.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
       Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2014 by Steffen Mueller Copyright (C) 2012,
       2013, 2014 by Yves Orton

       The license for the code in this distribution is the following, with
       the exceptions listed below:

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

       Except portions taken from Marc Lehmann's code for the JSON::XS module,
       which is licensed under the same terms as this module.

       Also except the code for Snappy compression library, whose license is
       reproduced below and which, to the best of our knowledge, is compatible
       with this module's license. The license for the enclosed Snappy code
       is:

         Copyright 2011, Google Inc.
         All rights reserved.

         Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
         modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
         met:

           * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
         notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
           * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
         copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer
         in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
         distribution.
           * Neither the name of Google Inc. nor the names of its
         contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
         this software without specific prior written permission.

         THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS
         "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
         LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
         A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT
         OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
         SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
         LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
         DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
         THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
         (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
         OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

perl v5.36.0                      2023-02-10              Sereal::Encoder(3pm)

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