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Compact JSON in .zarray

See original GitHub issue

JSON output is deliberately made human-readable with much whitespace. That produces large .zarray files with string arrays and categorize. In one small example with about 150 different strings, the human-readable .zarray was 3837 bytes and the compact version was 1284 bytes. With a larger variety of strings, the difference would be larger.

As Zarr is a storage format that isn’t intended for human readability, I would like to propose to write JSON with indent=None, separators=(",", ":").

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 3 years ago
Comments:6 (5 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

3reactions

shoyercommented, Mar 5, 2021

I’ll take a contrarian perspective: I don’t mind the difference between storing/downloading/uploading a 3 KB and a 1 KB metadata file (or even 30 KB vs 10 KB), and I like readable human JSON. This is a tiny little bit of data compared to even a single array chunk.

0reactions

rabernatcommented, Mar 5, 2021

Good points. Perhaps we could have an option for this. Similar to xarray’s option machinery. Like zarr.set_options(compact_json=True).