CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rustserde
fadedbee
fadedbee

Reputation: 44807

How can I serialise Rust object to Rust literals using serde?

I would like to use serde in code generation, embedding some complex nested object iterals into generated code.

I'm not expecting to serde produce anything other than something of the form:

const FOO: Foo = Foo {
    bar: 0,
    baz: Baz {
        quux: 1
    }
};

(Perhaps with me supplying the const FOO: Foo =.)

Ron would seem to be the crate to use, but it looks like it doesn't produce the Rust syntax for literal values.

Have I misunderstood its purpose?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 384

Answers (1)

Sven Marnach
Sven Marnach

Reputation: 602635

To literally do what you asked for you need to write a custom Serde serializer. It will be a bit of work to get all the details right. Most literals (e.g. strings, characters and numbers) can be serialized to valid Rust literals using the Display implementation of proc_macro2::Literal, which will take care of escaping special characters, suffixing floating point numbers with .0 if needed and similar details. However, it looks like implementing a serializer for structs will be up to you.

The most common approach to code generation in Rust is writing a proc macro, and using the quote crate to emit the source code. I don't know enough about your use case to be able to tell whether this would be a useful approach for your problem.

Upvotes: 1

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