The Tabular Data (TDAT) Data Interchange Format

TDAT is a data interchange format for tabular data. It is derived from CSV (Comma Separated Values). Its main characteristics are:

• well-specified
• type-safe
• machine readable (and writable)
• human readable (and writable)

A sample looks like this:

persons
|id:i   |name:s      |male:b     |birth:t
|1      |"John Doe"  |true       |1972-05-03T10:11:12.193
|2      |"Jane Doe"  |false      |1973-04-21T04:12:54.677
|3      |"Paul Doe"  |true       |2004-01-02T08:04:12.677
|4      |"Baby Doe"  |           |

For a full specification of TDAT, see rfc.txt included in this repository.

What is included

This repository is the reference implementation for TDAT. It provides

• A specification (see rcf.txt)
• A parser and a renderer (generator) for TDAT models
• The tdat tool for validating TDAT files and converting them into various other formats (JSON, CSV)

Use it

Get it with

go get github.com/cvilsmeier/tdat

Performance

TDAT compares well with JSON. This reference implementation includes benchmarks that compare TDAT performance against JSON performance for sample data. The benchmarks can be executed with the go tool:

go test -bench github.com/cvilsmeier/tdat/...

Author

C.Vilsmeier