Data::Taxi version 0.96
=========================

NAME
    Data::Taxi - Taint-aware, XML-ish data serialization

    PLEASE NOTE: Data::Taxi is no longer being developed or supported.

SYNOPSIS
      use Data::Taxi ':all';
      my ($ob, $str);
  
      $ob = MyClass->new();
      $str = freeze($ob);
      $ob = thaw($str);

INSTALLATION
    Data::Taxi can be installed with the usual routine:

            perl Makefile.PL
            make
            make test
            make install

    You can also just copy Taxi.pm into the Data/ directory of one of your
    library trees.

DESCRIPTION
    Taxi (Taint-Aware XML-Ish) is a data serializer with several handy
    features:

    Taint aware
        Taxi does not force you to trust the data you are serializing. None
        of the input data is executed.

    Human readable
        Taxi produces a human-readable string that simplifies checking the
        output of your objects.

    XML-ish
        While I don't (currently) promise full XML compliance, Taxi produces
        a block of XML-ish data that could probably be read in by other XML
        parsers.

EXPORT
    None by default. freeze and thaw with ':all':

       use Data::Taxi ':all';

Subroutines
  freeze($ob, %opts)
    "freeze" serializes a single scalar, hash reference, array reference, or
    scalar reference into an XML string, "freeze" can recurse any number of
    levels of a nested tree and preserve multiple references to the same
    object. Let's look at an example:

            my ($tree, $format, $members, $bool, $mysca);
        
            # anonymous hash
            $format = {
                    'app'=>'trini',
                    'ver'=>'0.9',
                    'ver'=>'this & that',
            };
        
            # anonymous array
            $members = ['Starflower', 'Mary', 'Paul', 'Hallie', 'Ryan'];
        
            # blessed object
            $bool = Math::BooleanEval->new('whatever');
        
            # scalar reference (to an anonymous hash, no less)
            $mysca = {'name'=>'miko', 'email'=>'miko@idocs.com', };
        
            # the whole thing
            $tree = {
                    'dataformat' => $format,
                    'otherdataformat' => $format,
                    'bool' => $bool,
                    'members' => $members,
                    'myscaref' => \$mysca,
            };
        
            $frozen = freeze($tree);

    "freeze" accepts one object as input. The code above results in the
    following XML-ish string:

       <taxi ver="1.00">
          <hashref id="0">
             <hashref name="otherdataformat" id="1">
                <scalar name="ver" value="this &#38;amp; that"/>
                <scalar name="app" value="trini"/>
             </hashref>
             <scalarref name="myscaref" id="2">
                <hashref id="3">
                   <scalar name="email" value="miko@idocs.com"/>
                   <scalar name="name" value="miko"/>
                </hashref>
             </scalarref>
             <hashref name="bool" id="4" class="Math::BooleanEval">
                <hashref name="blanks" id="5">
                </hashref>
                <scalar name="pos" value="0"/>
                <arrayref name="arr" id="6">
                   <scalar value="whatever"/>
                </arrayref>
                <scalar name="expr" value="whatever"/>
             </hashref>
             <hashref name="dataformat" id="1" redundant="1"/>
             <arrayref name="members" id="7">
                <scalar value="Starflower"/>
                <scalar value="Mary"/>
                <scalar value="Paul"/>
                <scalar value="Hallie"/>
                <scalar value="Ryan"/>
             </arrayref>
          </hashref>
       </taxi>

  thaw
    "thaw" accepts one argument, the serialized data string, and returns a
    single value, the reconstituted data, rebuilding the entire data
    structure including blessed references.

       $tree = thaw($frozen);

IS TAXI DATA XML?
    Although Taxi's data format is XML-ish, it's not fully compliant to XML
    in all regards. For now, Taxi only promises that it can input its own
    output. The reason I didn't go for full XML compliance is that I wanted
    to keep Taxi as light as possible while achieving its main goal in life:
    pure-perl serialization. XML compliance is not part of that goal. If you
    want to help make Taxi fully XML compliant w/o making it bloated, that's
    cool, drop me an email and we can work together.

TODO
    Tied scalars don't work. The code started getting spaghettish trying to
    implement them, so I decided to use the Asimov method and stop thinking
    about it for a while. Tied hashes and arrays should work fine.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS
    Copyright (c) 2002 by Miko O'Sullivan. All rights reserved. This program
    is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
    same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any
    kind.

AUTHOR
    Miko O'Sullivan miko@idocs.com

VERSION
     Version 0.90    June 15, 2002
     initial public release

     Version 0.91    July 10, 2002
     minor improvment to documentation

     Version 0.94    April 26, 2003
     Fixed problem handling undefined scalars.

     Version 0.95    Oct 31, 2008
     Adding notice of last release

     Version 0.96    Nov 14, 2010
     Fixing bug: