Ion 1.1 Text Encoding

The Ion text encoding is a stream of UTF-8 encoded text. It is intended to be easy to read and write by humans.

Whitespace is insignificant and is only required where necessary to separate tokens. C-style comments (either block or in-line) are treated as whitespace; they are not part of the data model and implementations are not required to preserve them.

A text Ion 1.1 stream begins with the Ion 1.1 version marker ($ion_1_1) followed by a series of value literals and/or encoding expressions.