BSON

BSON has a published specification.{{Cite web|url=https://bsonspec.org/spec.html|title=BSON (Binary JSON): Specification|website=bsonspec.org|access-date=2021-11-24}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2247310&seqNum=4%20api.mongodb.com/python/current/api/bson/regex.html|title=Introducing NoSQL and MongoDB {{!}} What Is NoSQL? {{!}} InformIT|website=www.informit.com|access-date=2018-01-17}} The topmost element in the structure must be of type BSON object and

contains 1 or more elements, where an element consists of a field name, a type, and a value. Field names are strings. Types include:

• Unicode string (using the UTF-8 encoding)
• 32-bit integer
• 64-bit integer
• double (64-bit IEEE 754 floating point number, including NaN/Inf)
• decimal128 (128-bit IEEE 754-2008 floating point number; binary integer decimal (BID) variant), suitable as a carrier for decimal-place sensitive financial data and arbitrary precision numerics with 34 decimal digits of precision, a max value of approximately 10⁶¹⁴⁵
• datetime w/o time zone (long integer number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch)
• byte array (for arbitrary binary data)
• Boolean (true and false)
• null
• BSON object
• BSON array
• JavaScript code
• MD5 binary data
• Regular expression (Perl compatible regular expressions ("PCRE") version 8.41 with UTF-8 support){{Cite web|url=https://api.mongodb.com/python/current/api/bson/regex.html|title=regex – Tools for representing MongoDB regular expressions — PyMongo 3.6.0 documentation|website=api.mongodb.com|access-date=2018-01-17|archive-date=2016-05-10|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160510224657/https://api.mongodb.com/python/current/api/bson/regex.html|url-status=dead}}

An important differentiator to JSON is that BSON contains types not present in JSON (e.g. datetime, byte array, and proper IEEE 754 floats) and offers type-strict handling for several numeric types instead of a universal "number" type. For situations where these additional types need to be represented in a textual way, MongoDB's Extended JSON format{{Cite web|url=https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/mongodb-extended-json/|title=MongoDB Extended JSON documentation|website=docs.mongodb.com|access-date=2020-05-03}} can be used.

Compared to JSON, BSON is designed to be efficient both in storage space and scan-speed. Large elements in a BSON document are prefixed with a length field to facilitate scanning. In some cases, BSON will use more space than JSON due to the length prefixes and explicit array indices.

== Example ==

A document such as {{code|{"hello": "world"} }} will be stored as:

\x16\x00\x00\x00 // total document size

\x02 // 0x02 = type String

hello\x00 // field name

\x06\x00\x00\x00world\x00 // field value (size of value, value, null terminator)

\x00 // 0x00 = type EOO ('end of object')

• Comparison of data serialization formats
• JSON
• CBOR
• Smile (binary JSON)
• UBJSON

{{Reflist}}

• {{Official website|https://bsonspec.org/}}
• [https://docs.mongodb.com/database-tools/bsondump/ {{mono|bsondump}} tool included with MongoDB]

{{Data Exchange}}

Category:JSON

Category:Data serialization formats

Category:Document-oriented databases