Smile (data interchange format)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Smile" data interchange format – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Smile" data interchange format – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Smile is a computer data interchange format based on JSON. It can also be considered a binary serialization of the generic JSON data model, which means tools that operate on JSON may be used with Smile as well, as long as a proper encoder/decoder exists for the tool. The name comes from the first 2 bytes of the 4 byte header, which consist of Smiley ":)" followed by a linefeed: a choice made to make it easier to recognize Smile-encoded data files using textual command-line tools.

Compared to JSON, Smile is both more compact and more efficient to process (both to read and write).^[1] Part of this is due to more efficient binary encoding (similar to BSON, CBOR and UBJSON), but an additional feature is optional use of back references for property names and values. ^[2] Back referencing allows replacing of property names and/or short (64 bytes or less) String values with 1- or 2-byte reference ids.

Libraries known to support Smile include:

• Cheshire (Clojure) is a data encoding library that supports Smile as binary alternative to JSON
• Jackson (Java) with Binary dataformat module supporting Smile, Avro, CBOR, Ion and Protocol Buffers
• libsmile (C/C++; wrappers for Ruby, Perl)
• go-smile for decoding Smile data in Golang
• Protostuff (Java) supports multiple data formats for serialization, including Smile, JSON, XML and Protocol Buffers.
• PySmile for encoding/decoding Smile data in Python
• NewSmile for encoding/decoding Smile data in Python >= 3.7
• smile-js for decoding Smile data from Javascript
• serde_smile for encoding/decoding data from Rust

• Elasticsearch supports Smile with its APIs^[3]

• JSON
• BSON
• CBOR
• UBJSON
• Comparison of data serialization formats

• Smile format specification