README

Encode/decode CBOR

This package provides an extensible CBOR encoder/decoder.

Usage

var CBOR = require('cbor-sync');

var encodedBuffer = CBOR.encode({hello: 'world'});
var decodedObject = CBOR.decode(encodedBuffer);

`toCBOR()`

Much like the toJSON() method, which allows objects to provide a replacement representation for encoding, this package checks for a toCBOR() method.

Note that this step happens after any semantic-tagging/-replacement step, so a custom semantic encoder will always override an objects built-in toCBOR() method.

Semantic extensions

CBOR provides a limited set of basic types (similar to JSON), but provides semantic tagging (optional for both encoder/decoder) that lets you annotate parts of the data so they can be decoded appropriately.

Here is an example (from this module) for encoding Date objects as ISO strings:

// 0 is the CBOR semantic tag number for date/time strings: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049#section-2.4
CBOR.addSemanticEncode(0, function (data) {
    if (data instanceof Date) {
        return data.toISOString();
    }
});
CBOR.addSemanticDecode(0, function (dateString) {
    return new Date(dateString);
});

Known issues

All floats encoded as 64-bit, regardless of whether they strictly need to be

Usage no npm install needed!