Data Serialization Basics
Explains what serialization and deserialization are and how format conversion works.
Serialization is the act of turning an in-memory data structure into text or bytes that can be stored or transmitted. Turning that text back into a data structure is called deserialization (parsing).
Format conversion is in fact a combination of these two steps. It parses the source format into a common data model (objects, arrays, and values), then serializes that model back into the target format. This tool works the same way internally.
As a result, some information can be lost between formats of differing expressiveness. For example, serializing hierarchically structured data into flat CSV makes it hard to preserve the nesting information fully.