Feather is binary columnar serialization for data frames. It is designed to read and write data frames very efficiently, and to make it easy to share data across multiple data analysis languages. The initial version of Feather comes with bindings for python (written by Wes McKinney) and R (written by Hadley Wickham).

Feather uses the Apache Arrow columnar memory specification to representing binary data on disk in a way that can be read and written very rapidly. This is particularly important for encoding null/NA values and variable-length types like UTF8 strings. Feather is complementary to Apache Arrow because Arrow does not provide a file format, so Feather defines its own schemas and metadata for an on-disk representation.

Feather currently supports the following column types:

• A wide range of numeric types (int8, int16, int32, int64, uint8, uint16, uint32, uint64, float, double).
• Logical/boolean values.
• Dates, times, and timestamps.
• Factors/categorical variables that have fixed set of possible values.
• UTF-8 encoded strings.
• Arbitrary binary data.

All column types support NA/null values.

This library is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

See NOTICE for details about the library's copyright holders.