Binary types

[nagy]

Please support the deserialization of binary types into Vec<u8> .

[dtolnay]

Seems reasonable, I would accept a PR to implement this.

[Beiri22]

is someone working on that?

[bobdebuildr]

This is a feature I would really like. I'm new to implementing serde internals, but could take a look at implementing this. A few questions:

• If the two functions deserialize_bytes and deserialize_byte_buf were implemented, which types could we deserialize to? I guess Vec<u8> would not work, just something like serde_bytes::ByteBuf and serde_bytes::Byte, respectively. Is this correct?
• What would be needed to deserialize to Vec<u8> directly?
• The document mentioned in the original post defines that base64 is used to encode the data. Which base64 dependency would you prefer to add for this feature?

In case anyone else has this problem, I'm currently using the following workaround:

cargo add base64 serde serde_yaml

use serde::{de::Error, Deserialize, Deserializer, Serialize, Serializer};

fn from_base64<'de, D: Deserializer<'de>>(deserializer: D) -> Result<Vec<u8>, D::Error> {
    let mut s: String = Deserialize::deserialize(deserializer)?;
    s.retain(|c| !c.is_whitespace());
    base64::decode(s).map_err(D::Error::custom)
}

fn to_base64<S: Serializer>(x: &[u8], s: S) -> Result<S::Ok, S::Error> {
    s.serialize_str(&base64::encode(x))
}

#[derive(Debug, Deserialize, Serialize)]
struct MyThing {
    #[serde(deserialize_with = "from_base64", serialize_with = "to_base64")]
    data: Vec<u8>,
}