Feature Request: read .qs2 attributes without full load

[RossanaTat]

Hi @traversc and {qs2} team,

Thanks for the great work on qs2!

In the previous qs package, there was a function qattributes() that allowed reading the attributes of a .qs file without fully loading the object into memory. This was extremely useful for inspecting large datasets efficiently.

I was wondering if it would be possible to implement a similar function for .qs2 files in qs2, something like qs2_attributes() or an option in qx_dump(), to retrieve only the metadata/attributes without deserializing the entire object.

This would be very helpful for workflows that involve large files where loading the full object just to check metadata is too costly.

Thanks for considering this request!

Best regards,
Rossana Tatulli

[traversc]

Hi thanks for the suggestion! This is not possible with the qs2 format since it relies on R built in serialization, so I can't go in and pull out only parts of it.

If there is interest a simple helper function could be added to the package:

qs2_attributes <- function(...) {
  attributes(qs2::qs_read(...))
}

Of course this still deserializes the whole object first.