I Need a Human Readable, Yet Parse-able Document Format

Question

I\'m working on one of those projects where there are a million better ways to accomplish what I need but I have no choice and I have to do it this way. Here it is:

Ther

Answer 1

You might want to look into YAML

http://www.yaml.org/

I agree with Pablo Fernandez response. I think JSON might be a good choice as well.

Answer 2

XML is an option.

Answer 3

I'm just gonna say that an INI string is pretty readable:

Pet_Name = "Fred"

But, you could always roll your own format. Something like:

Key: ValueValueValueValueValueValue
Key: ValueValue

Basically, you would explode the string by newlines, look for text strings infront of colons and use that as the key, and the data after the colon and before the newline is the value.

Answer 4

I Need a Human Readable, Yet Parse-able Document Format

This is what YAML was designed to be. You can read more about it on their site or on Wikipedia.

To quote Wikipedia:

YAML syntax was designed to be easily mapped to data types common to most high-level languages: list, hash, and scalar. Its familiar indented outline and lean appearance makes it especially suited for tasks where humans are likely to view or edit data structures, such as configuration files, dumping during debugging, and document headers

The advantage over XML is that it doesn't use tags which might confuse users. And I think it's cleaner than INI (which was also mentioned) because it simply uses colons instead of equals signs, semicolons and quotes.

Sample YAML looks like:

invoice: 34843
date   : 2001-01-23
bill-to: &id001
    given  : Chris
    family : Dumars
    address:
        lines: |
            458 Walkman Dr.
            Suite #292
        city    : Royal Oak
        state   : MI
        postal  : 48046
ship-to: *id001
product:
    - sku         : BL394D
      quantity    : 4
      description : Basketball
      price       : 450.00
    - sku         : BL4438H
      quantity    : 1
      description : Super Hoop
      price       : 2392.00
tax  : 251.42
total: 4443.52
comments: >
    Late afternoon is best.
    Backup contact is Nancy
    Billsmer @ 338-4338.

Answer 5

I'd say either use

• INI files or
• YAML or
• Markdown or
• Textile

or just about any lightweight markup language you deem appropriate.