Re: [Cbor] A CBOR tag for alternatives/unions, request for comments

[Emile Cormier <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 10:48 AM Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I’m not currently proposing to standardize this, but the cbor diagnostic
> tools support a transform to tunnel CBOR data items through JSON [0]:
>
> $ echo "122(h'1234')" | diag2cbor.rb | cbor2json.rb -j
> {
>   "@@!t122": {
>     "@@!b": "EjQ"
>   }
> }
>
> This works by hijacking JSON object keys starting with @@!; I’m not sure
> the code handles all cases so we have achieved full transparency yet, but
> that is a SMOP [1].
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
> [0]: https://github.com/cabo/cbor-diag/blob/master/lib/cbor-transform-j.rb
> [1]: SMOP = Small matter of programming
>

I was thinking something as simple as:

[<alt_index>, <value>]

where <alt_index> is a JSON number and <value> is the datum transcoded to
JSON. However, transcoding this back to CBOR would be lossy without any
other context.