README

Configuration file parser for a somewhat structures properties file
format.  (The syntax borrows a lot from [1])

The parser is designed to be as small and simple as possible.

The syntax of the config files should resemble standard properties
(prop = value) with the additional functionality for structuring the
data.  A "structprop" file is an UTF-8 file.

Comments start with '#' and continue until the end of the line.

Line feeds, spaces and tabs are all treated as white space. There are
three special characters; '=', '{' and '}'.  '=' is used to assign a
value to a property.  '{' and '}' are used to encapsulate structured
data.

Arrays are made up out of simple values enclosed inside a {}-pair.
For example (array with values 1, 2 and "abc").

  key = { 1 2 abc }

Since linefeed is like any other whitespace character, the value can
be broken up onto several lines:

  key = {
    1
    2
    abc
  }

The data can be structued into objects (think of it as a hash-map) by
adding a {}-pair after the key.  The content of the object is key-value
pairs or other objects.

  name {
    key = value
    what = foo
  }

Keys and values are regular strings that can contain any characters
except the ones mentioned earlier (linefeed, space, tab, #, {, }, =)
provided that the string is not double-quoted.

  key = "a value with a space in it"

The python module contains two functions: loads and dumps.  "loads"
parses a string into a python dictionary.  "dumps" writes a structprop
representation of a python dictionary as a string.

"loads" will try to parse values as regular JSON values (the string
"1" will become an integer with value 1).  If it fails, it will leave
the value as a string.

Example:

  # This is a simple example config file
  database {
    hostname = localhost
    username = dbuser
    password = secret
    port = 12361
    database = TheDatabase
  }

  tables = { Table1 Table2 }


[1] https://github.com/matjam/StructuredProperties