binary

Specifies the data representation format of a field in imported or exported data as binary.

Applies to

Fields of all data types except string, ustring, and raw; record, subrec or tagged containing at least one field that is neither string nor raw.

Syntax

record { binary }
 field_definition  { binary };

This option specifies binary data; data is formatted as text by default (see "text" ).

Meanings

The binary property has different meanings when applied to different data types:

• For decimals, binary means packed (see "packed" ).
• For other numerical data types, binary means "not text".
• For dates, binary is equivalent to specifying the julian property for the date field (see "julian" ).
• For time, binary is equivalent to midnight_seconds (see "midnight_seconds" ).
• For timestamp, binary specifies that the first integer contains a Julian day count for the date portion of the timestamp and the second integer specifies the time portion of the timestamp as the number of seconds from midnight; on export, binary specifies to export a timestamp to two 32-bit integers.

Restrictions

If you specify binary as a property of a numeric field, the data type of an imported or exported field must be the same as the corresponding field defined in a record schema. No type conversions are performed among the different numeric data types (as would be the case if text was specified instead).

This property is mutually exclusive with text, c_format, in_format, and out_format.

Examples

For example, the following defines a schema using binary representation for the imported or exported numeric fields with no delimiter between fields:

record { binary, delim = none } (
           a:int32; 
           b:int16; 
           c:int8; ) 
					"record {text} ( "

The following statement overrides the record-level setting of field b as text:

record {text} (
          a:int32; 
          b:int16 {binary}; 
          c:int8; )