Must be easy to use

Software development and maintenance is costly

The more steps there are and the more complicated the steps, the harder it is to develop and maintain. Simplicity is key.

Concise Encoding is designed for ease-of-use:

• It's editable as plain text. Viewing and editing binary data is awful because it's so human-hostile. Concise Encoding solves this with twin text and binary formats. Edit in text, transmit in binary.
• All fundamental types are supported natively. When types are limited, you must adopt ways to encode your data into strings, which is complicated, slow, causes incompatibilities, and opens up security holes.
• There are no extra build steps. Just import the library and go.
• Debugging is easy: Seamlessly convert the binary document to/from text format and examine, modify, play.

Must be efficient

Processing and bandwidth are costly

Text formats are convenient, but they're slow and bloated. Efficiency is the name of the game nowadays.

Concise Encoding is designed for efficiency:

• With its twin text/binary format, you can transmit your data in efficient binary, and still edit in convenient text.
• Streaming is efficient: You don't need to know the size of your data up front, which avoids buffering bottlenecks.
• The most common types and values are encoded in the smallest space.
• It's a byte-oriented format, keeping complicated bitfield encodings to a minimum.

Must be worry-free

Protect your data in a hostile world

Did you know that slightly different behaviors in parsers can lead to a security breach? A rounding or replacing Python parser at the access-control level mixed with a truncating Go parser at the database level could be exploited to poison your data and elevate privileges!

Concise encoding is designed for security, compatibility, and the future:

• It's tightly specified. Optional and ambiguous behaviors are kept to a minimum.
• It has intelligent defaults. Doing the right thing happens almost automatically.
• All documents are versioned, ensuring forward and backward compatibility forever.
• It can't be misinterpreted as text. All binary documents begin with 0x83, which is guaranteed invalid in UTF-8, ISO-8859, and ASCII. This makes it safe for use in QR codes, for example.

Numeric

                
c1
{
    "boolean"       = true
    "binary int"    = -0b10001011
    "octal int"     = 0o644
    "decimal int"   = -10000000
    "hex int"       = 0xfffe0001
    "very long int" = 100000000000000000000000000000000000009
    "decimal float" = -14.125
    "hex float"     = 0x5.1ec4p+20
    "very long flt" = 4.957234990634579394723460546348e+100000
    "not-a-number"  = nan
    "infinity"      = inf
    "neg infinity"  = -inf
}
                
            

String-Like

                
c1
{
    "string" = "Strings support escape sequences: \n \t \27f"
    "url"    = @"https://example.com/"
    "email"  = @"mailto:me@somewhere.com"
}
                
            

Other Basic Types

                
c1
{
    "uuid"      = f1ce4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000
    "date"      = 2019-07-01
    "time"      = 18:04:00.940231541/E/Prague
    "timestamp" = 2010-07-15/13:28:15.415942344/Z
    "na"        = na:"database is offline"
    "nil"       = nil
    "media"     = |application/x-sh 23 21 2f 62 69 6e 2f 73 68 0a 0a
                  65 63 68 6f 20 68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f 72 6c 64 0a|
}
                
            

Containers

                
c1
{
    "list"          = [1 2.5 "a string"]
    "map"           = {"one"=1 2="two" "today"=2020-09-10}
    "bytes"         = |u8x 01 ff de ad be ef|
    "int16 array"   = |i16 7374 17466 -9957|
    "uint16 hex"    = |u16x 91fe 443a 9c15|
    "float32 array" = |f32 1.5e10 -8.31e-12|
}
                
            

Markup

                
c1
{
    "main-view" = <View,
        <Image "src"=@"img/avatar-image.jpg">
        <Text "id"="HelloText",
            Hello! Please choose a name!
        >
        // OnChange contains code which might have problematic characters.
        // Use verbatim sequences (\.IDENTIFIER ... IDENTIFIER) to handle this.
        <TextInput "id"="NameInput" "style"={"height"=40 "color"="gray"} "OnChange"="\.@@
            NameInput.Parent.InsertRawAfter(NameInput, '<Image "src"=@"img/check.svg">')
            HelloText.SetText("Hello, " + NameInput.Text + "!")
            @@",
            Name me!
        >
    >
}
                
            

References

                
c1
{
    // Entire map will be referenced later as $id1
    "marked object" = &id1:{
        "recursive" = $id1
    }
    "ref1" = $id1
    "ref2" = $id1

    // Reference pointing to part of another document.
    "outside ref" = $@"https://xyz.com/document.cte#some_id"
}
                
            

Graphs

                
c1
//
// The weighted graph:
//
//     b
//    /|\
//   4 1 1
//  /  |  \
// a-3-c-4-d
//
{
    "vertices" = [
        &a:{}
        &b:{}
        &c:{}
        &d:{}
    ]
    "edges" = [
        @($a {"weight"=4 "direction"="both"} $b)
        @($a {"weight"=3 "direction"="both"} $c)
        @($b {"weight"=1 "direction"="both"} $c)
        @($b {"weight"=1 "direction"="both"} $d)
        @($c {"weight"=4 "direction"="both"} $d)
    ]
}
                
            

Trees

                
c1
//
// The tree:
//
//       2
//      / \
//     5   7
//    /   /|\
//   9   6 1 2
//  /   / \
// 4   8   5
//
(2
    (7
        2
        1
        (6
            5
            8
        )
    )
    (5
        (9
            4
        )
    )
)
                
            

Constants

                
c1
{
    /* Given: Actual type and value of "eggshell" and
     *        "navy-blue" have been defined in a schema
     */
    "wall color" = #eggshell
    "door color" = #navy-blue
}
                
            

Custom Types

                
c1
{
    // Custom types are user-defined, with user-supplied codecs.
    "custom text"   = |ct cplx(2.94+3i)|
    "custom binary" = |cb 04 f6 28 3c 40 00 00 40 40|
}