On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Galen Charlton <gmcha...@gmail.com> wrote: > The MARC::File::JSON module is consistent with other MARC::File::XXX > modules that handle serializing and deserializing MARC::Record > objects. > > MARC::Utils::MARC2Ini is an interesting concept, but it wouldn't take > much work to recast it as MARC::File::Ini. By using MARC::File::Foo > serializers/deserializers, you could also avoid the need for an > explicit MARC::Utils::MARC_in_JSON2Ini; instead, you could just do > this: > > my $rec = MARC::File::JSON::decode($json); > my $ini_string = MARC::File::Ini::encode($rec); >
In the case of 2Ini, I can very well see it fitting well as MARC::File::Ini, because the result of MARC2Ini is necessarily a string (because there is no "native" Ini structure). In the case of 2MARC_in_JSON (and 2Pairs), my thinking was more along the lines of having the native perl data structure to work on. That is, if a project would rather create MARC records as a perl MARC_in_JSON hash rather than as "born" MARC::Record objects, then there is a function for converting to MARC::Record for sharing to the world as necessary. I have to confess that I don't have a use case for this. In part, I was reacting to Paul's note about MARC::Loader, where they apparently are creating MARC data as a hash and then converting to MARC::Record. I'll pursue the Ini idea. I had already thought about a record separator. As it stands, the control fields are in a "null section" (represented explicitly by "[_]" following Config::Tiny's example). So this could be the record separator when reading/writing files. I had also thought about how to separate JSON records in a single file. Perhaps this has been solved already, but I haven't seen a reference to it. If it were YAML, you could simply put "\n---\n" between the JSON objects, and it would be simple to scan for that. Anyway, I'll think through this some more and see what might fall out as useful. Thanks, Brad
