marshalling.md

Introduction

Marshaling is a basic interface representing fixed-length (or known-length) cryptographic objects or structures having a built-in binary encoding. Implementors must ensure that calls to these methods do not modify the underlying object so that other users of the object can access it concurrently.

type Marshaling interface {
	encoding.BinaryMarshaler
	encoding.BinaryUnmarshaler

	String() string
	MarshalSize() int
	MarshalTo(w io.Writer) (int, error)
	UnmarshalFrom(r io.Reader) (int, error)
}

Data Members

BinaryMarshaler

type BinaryMarshaler interface {
	MarshalBinary() (data []byte, err error)
}

BinaryMarshaler is an interface present in the encoding library of Golang. It is an interface implemented by an object which can marshal itself into a binary form. MarshalBinary function encodes the receiver into a binary form and returns the result.

BinaryUnmarshaler

type BinaryUnmarshaler interface {
	UnmarshalBinary(data []byte) error
}

BinaryUnmarshaler is an interface present in the encoding library of Golang. It is an interface implemented by an object which can unmarshal a binary representation itself. UnmarshalBinary must be able ti decode the form generated by MarshalBinary. UnmarshalBinary must copy the data if wishes to retain the data after returning.

Functions

Note : The Object in here refers to the object of the class which has implemented the marshalling interface.

String()

Function	Object.String() string
Parameters	- None
Output	- string : The human readable string

This functions returns a human readable string representation of the object value.

MarshalSize()

Function	Object.MarshalSize() int
Parameters	- None
Output	- int : Length of the encoded object

The MarshalSize function returns the encoded length of the object in bytes

MarshalTo()

Function	Object.MarshalTo(io.Writer) (int, error)
Parameters	- io.Writer : The destination writer to which the object will be marshalled
Output	- int : Number of bytes written - error : Contains an error if something unexpected happened, otherwise nil

The MarshalTo function is used to encode the contents of the object and then write them to an io.Writer. The int being returned here indicates the byte count of the encoded object.

UnmarshalFrom()

Function	Object.UnmarshalFrom(r io.Reader) (int, error)
Parameters	- io.Reader : The source from where the object will be unmarshalled from
Output	- int : Number of bytes written - error : Contains an error if something unexpected happened, otherwise nil

This function decodes the content of the object by reading from io.Reader. If r is an XOF, it uses r o pick a valid object pseudo-randomly, which may entail more than Len bytes due to retries.