Ion is a data serialization language developed by

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

. It may be represented by either a human-readable text form or a compact binary form. The text form is a superset of

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

; thus, any valid JSON document is also a valid Ion document.

Data types

As a superset of JSON, Ion includes the following data types * : An empty value * : Boolean values * : Unicode text literals * : Ordered heterogeneous collection of Ion values * : Unordered collection of key/value pairs The nebulous JSON 'number' type is strictly defined in Ion to be one of * : Signed integers of arbitrary size * : 64-bit IEEE binary-encoded floating point numbers * : Decimal-encoded real numbers of arbitrary precision Ion adds these types: * : Date/time/time zone moments of arbitrary precision * : Unicode symbolic atoms (aka identifiers) * : Binary data of user-defined encoding * : Text data of user-defined encoding * : Ordered collections of values with application-defined semantics Each Ion type supports a null variant, indicating a lack of value while maintaining a strict type (e.g., , ). The Ion format permits annotations to any value in the form of symbols. Such annotations may be used as metadata for otherwise opaque data (such as a blob).

Implementations

Amazon supported library implementations

C#

Go Lang

Python

JS

Examples

Sample document

// comments are allowed in Ion files using the double forward slash

Uses

* Amazon's Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) stores data in Ion documents.
PartiQL
an open source SQL-based query language also by Amazon, is built upon Ion. PartiQL supported queries are used by QLDB, S3Select.

Tooling and extensions

Ion Path Extractor API
aims to combine the convenience of a DOM API with the speed of a streaming API. * IDE support *
Eclipse
*
IntelliJ

Jackson data format module for Ion

Apache Hive SerDe
for Ion
Ion Schema
*

*
Implementations

Ion Hash
defines an algorithm for constructing a hash for any Ion value. *

*

References

External links

Java API documentation

C# implementation
{{Data Exchange Data serialization formats Markup languages