cross-version customisable but unsafe (not secure against erroneous or malicious data) serialization format. Malformed or maliciously constructed data, may cause the deserializer to import arbitrary modules and instantiate any object. The standard library also includes modules serializing to standard data formats: json (with built-in support for basic scalar and collection types and able to support arbitrary types via encoding and decoding hooks). plistlib (with support for both binary and XML property list formats). xdrlib (with support for the External Data Representation (XDR) standard as described in RFC 1014). Finally, it is recommended that an object's __repr__ be evaluable in the right environment, making it a rough match for Common Lisp's print-object. Not all object types can be pickled automatically, especially ones that hold operating system resources like file handles, but users can register custom "reduction" and construction functions to support the pickling and unpickling of arbitrary types. Pickle was originally implemented as the pure Python pickle module, but, in versions of Python prior to 3.0, the cPickle module (also a built-in) offers improved performance (up to 1000 times faster). The cPickle was adapted from the Unladen Swallow project. In Python 3, users should always import the standard version, which attempts to import the accelerated version and falls back to the pure Python version. R R has the function dput which writes an ASCII text representation of an R object to a file or connection. A representation can be read from a file using dget. More specific, the function serialize serializes an R object to a connection, the output being a raw vector coded in hexadecimal format. The unserialize function allows to read an object from a connection or a raw vector. REBOL REBOL will serialize to file (save/all) or to a string! (mold/all). Strings and files can be deserialized using the polymorphic load function. RProtoBuf provides cross-language data serialization in R, using Protocol Buffers. Ruby Ruby includes the standard module Marshal with 2 methods dump and load, akin to the standard Unix utilities dump and restore. These methods serialize to the standard class String, that is, they effectively become a sequence of bytes. Some objects cannot be serialized (doing so would raise a TypeError exception): bindings, procedure objects, instances of class IO, singleton objects and interfaces. If a class requires custom serialization (for example, it requires certain cleanup actions done on dumping / restoring), it can be done by implementing