The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need for version negotiation.
!!! abstract "References"
- [CBOR Website](http://cbor.io) - the main source on CBOR
- [CBOR Playground](http://cbor.me) - an interactive webpage to translate between JSON and CBOR
- [RFC 7049](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049) - the CBOR specification
## Serialization
The library uses the following mapping from JSON values types to CBOR types according to the CBOR specification (RFC 7049):
JSON value type | value/range | CBOR type | first byte
The mapping is **complete** in the sense that any JSON value type can be converted to a CBOR value.
!!! info "NaN/infinity handling"
If NaN or Infinity are stored inside a JSON number, they are serialized properly. This behavior differs from the normal JSON serialization which serializes NaN or Infinity to `null`.
!!! info "Unused CBOR types"
The following CBOR types are not used in the conversion:
The mapping is **incomplete** in the sense that not all CBOR types can be converted to a JSON value. The following CBOR types are not supported and will yield parse errors:
- date/time (0xC0..0xC1)
- bignum (0xC2..0xC3)
- decimal fraction (0xC4)
- bigfloat (0xC5)
- expected conversions (0xD5..0xD7)
- simple values (0xE0..0xF3, 0xF8)
- undefined (0xF7)
!!! warning "Object keys"
CBOR allows map keys of any type, whereas JSON only allows strings as keys in object values. Therefore, CBOR maps with keys other than UTF-8 strings are rejected.
Tagged items will throw a parse error by default. They can be ignored by passing `cbor_tag_handler_t::ignore` to function `from_cbor`. They can be stored by passing `cbor_tag_handler_t::store` to function `from_cbor`.
