Packing & Unpacking

As Michelson provides the instructions PACK and UNPACK for data serialisation, so does LIGO with Bytes.pack and Bytes.unpack. The former serialises Michelson data structures into a binary format, and the latter reverses that transformation. Unpacking may fail, so the return type of Byte.unpack is an option that needs to be annotated.

Note: PACK and UNPACK are Michelson instructions that are intended to be used by people that really know what they are doing. There are several risks and failure cases, such as unpacking a lambda from an untrusted source or casting the result to the wrong type. Be careful.

const id_string = (p: string) : option<string> => {

let packed = Bytes.pack(p);

return Bytes.unpack(packed);

};