CBORPath proposal + implementation in Rust

[mcatanzariti]

Based on the JSONPath Internet Draft, I recently wrote a CBORPath implementation in Rust: https://github.com/dahomey-technologies/cborpath-rs.

The main difference between JSONPath and my CBORPath proposal is that CBORPath is itself represented as a valid CBOR expression.

Pros:

• Any valid CBOR value, including a byte string can be expressed in a CBORPath expression.
• A CBOR map key can be any valid CBOR value, not only text like JSON object names. Consequently, the JSONPath name-selector is replaced by a CBORPath key-selector.
• An existing CBOR parser or deserializer is enough to validate a CBORPath expression, no need to write neither a grammar nor a parser.

Cons:

• A CBORPath expression is more verbose than the JSONPath equivalent

Thank you to give your thoughts about the proposal. I may take the time to write an Internet draft.

Michaël

PS: reddit post link

[cabo]

Interesting! I'll look at this in more detail, but doing something like this certainly was in the cards.
We'll have a JSONPath interim meeting on Tuesday and a CBOR interim meeting on Wednesday; I'll make sure that this work gets some mention there (even if there isn't an Internet-Draft¹ to discuss yet).

Footnotes

1. This is what we like to call our draft RFCs, because they aren't RFCs yet... ↩