configuration formats / languages

[Skaperen]

there are two kinds of "human editable" to consider, that these people making these standards do no make clear.

1.  a human can find particular strings or numbers and change them, in a file already built by some program. they might be able to use the sed program if the strings are unique.

2.  a human can create this file from scratch ... at least when the needed size is not too large.


i prefer a format that works for both needs.  JSON and XML do poorly at number 2 (BTDT).  so i went with python as the format for my things.  most of my configs are fairly small.

dir = "~/keep"

blocksize    = 4096 # for both read and write
error_action = retry
retry_times  = 15

i think that with a few examples, most computer users that can edit a text file can make these. on the second example, some names like "retry" and "abort" could be predefined in the dictionary used as the local namespace when calling exec().

[nilamo]

local namespace when calling exec().

You don't just import the config?

[Skaperen]

just importing it would be the basic way in most cases.  but setting some variables or defining some function or classes could make coding it simpler, such as:

actions = (edit, save, publish)

vs.

actions = ("edit", "save", "publish")

[nilamo]

Unless the first line of your config.py was something like from constants import *, and edit, save, publish were all defined in there?

[Skaperen]

i do want to be able to have the config files in different locations in th filesystem namespace, like in /etc and in ~/.config and even http://example.net/configs/.

[sjdv1982]

I use JSON if my config is machine-generated, CSON is it's handwritten.

[Skaperen]

CSON?  is that related to BSON?

[sjdv1982]

I don't know about BSON, but CSON addresses pretty much all the weaknesses of JSON that were mentioned in the beginning of the thread.
https://github.com/lifthrasiir/cson

[metulburr]

i just use JSON

[Skaperen]

JSON would let you load from ~/.config/... whereas import would not.  but JSON lacks some data types like set.  JSON also does not allow more code-ish configs like:

table = ['' for x in range(256)]
table[13]='\\r'

which i have found to be useful at times (slightly longer stuff such as reading from a file).  i also read that you cannot put comments in JSON.  BSON is not built in to python (yet). so i will continue to use python-style configs using my pyconfig module (that also cleans up som stuff the interpreter puts in.