faq.html

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    <title>BSON (Binary JSON): FAQ</title>
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<h2 class="nojs">FAQ</h2>

<div class="info" id="faq">
            <h3>What is the point of BSON when it is no smaller than
            JSON in some cases?</h3>

            <p>BSON is designed to be efficient in space, but in some
            cases is not much more efficient than JSON. In some cases
            BSON uses even more space than JSON. The reason for this
            is another of the BSON design goals: traversability. BSON
            adds some "extra" information to documents, like length of
            strings and subobjects. This makes traversal faster.
            </p>

            <p>BSON is also designed to be fast to encode and
            decode. For example, integers are stored as 32 (or 64) bit
            integers, so they don't need to be parsed to and from
            text. This uses more space than JSON for small integers,
            but is much faster to parse.</p>

            <p>In addition to compactness, BSON adds additional data
            types unavailable in JSON, notably the BinData and
            Date data types.</p>

            <h3>What is a <tt>.bson</tt> file?</h3>
            BSON files (by convention, using "<tt>.bson</tt>"
            extension) contain zero or more BSON documents
            written contiguously to a flat file.  For example, the
            MongoDB <tt>mongodump</tt>
            utility outputs BSON files. The <a href="https://www.github.com/dwight/bsontools">bsontools</a>
            utilities manipulate BSON files.

            <h3>Where can I get more help/information?</h3>
            <p>The best place to ask questions about BSON is on
            the <a href="https://groups.google.com/group/bson">BSON
            mailing list</a>.

            <h3>How can I contribute or make fixes to this site?</h3>
            <p>The best way to contribute to this site is to
            fork the <a href="https://github.com/mongodb/bsonspec.org">bsonspec.org</a>
            project on GitHub and submit a pull request.</p>
</div>
            <h2>Examples</h2>
<div>
            <p>The following are some example documents (in JavaScript
            / Python style syntax) and their corresponding BSON
            representations.</p>

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<pre>
 {"hello": "world"}
</pre>
</td>
<td> &rarr; </td>
<td><pre>

  \x16\x00\x00\x00                   // total document size
  \x02                               // 0x02 = type String
  hello\x00                          // field name
  \x06\x00\x00\x00world\x00          // field value
  \x00                               // 0x00 = type EOO ('end of object')

</pre></td>
</tr><tr>
<td><pre>
 {"BSON": ["awesome", 5.05, 1986]}
</pre></td>
<td> &rarr; </td>
<td><pre>
  \x31\x00\x00\x00
  \x04BSON\x00
  \x26\x00\x00\x00
  \x02\x30\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00awesome\x00
  \x01\x31\x00\x33\x33\x33\x33\x33\x33\x14\x40
  \x10\x32\x00\xc2\x07\x00\x00
  \x00
  \x00
</pre></td>
</tr></table>

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