[Open Babel] Serializing OBMol to memory

[<ern...@ba...>]

Hello,

>what would be the preferred method of serializing an OBMol object into 
memory?

>Endianness et al. is not an issue, but the whole data structure should be 
saved.

>I assume that instead of storing e.g. a SMILES string and building the 
OBMol every time it's needed from that string, reading a readymade OBMol 
into memory is faster...?

maybe I shall clarify my question. :-)

I filter many matches of OBMols through a SMARTS pattern in PostgreSQL. 
Within PostgreSQL, every time a function is called - per table row - it 
forgets all that was before. So I have to parse the OBMol _every row_ and 
instantiate the SMARTS Pattern _every row_.

For the SMARTS pattern, there might be a solution of saving a pointer to 
in shared memory between calls to avoid init()-ing it every call, but for 
the parsing of the OBMols I'm still searching for a clever method to avoid 
the parsing and perception steps every time. As parsing and perception can 
be done upon saving the OBMol the first time in the database, a means of 
storing the OBMol, or at least the essential data structures to recreate 
it faster than from a textual format like SMILES, would be great. Is this 
RTFM? I have not found any documentation about serializing OBMol, parts of 
OBMol or something like the fastest input format yet...

Best Regards

Ernst-Georg Schmid