nestext

Processing NestedText (NestedText: A Human Friendly Data Format) in Go.

A description of NestedText by the authors:

NestedText is a file format for holding structured data that is to be entered, edited, or viewed by people. It allows data to be organized into a nested collection of dictionaries, lists, and strings without the need for quoting or escaping. In this way it is similar to JSON, YAML and TOML, but without the complexity and risk of YAML and without the syntactic clutter of JSON and TOML. NestedText is both simple and natural.

To get a feel for the NestedText format, take a look at the following example (shortended version from the NestedText site):

# Contact information for our officers

president:
    name: Katheryn McDaniel
    address:
        > 138 Almond Street
        > Topeka, Kansas 20697
    phone:
        cell: 1-210-555-5297
        home: 1-210-555-8470
        # Katheryn prefers that we always call her on her cell phone.
    email: KateMcD@aol.com
    additional roles:
        - board member

vice president:
    name: Margaret Hodge
    …

NestedText does not interpret any data types (unlike YAML), nor does it impose a schema. All of that has to be done by the application.

Decoding

Parse(…) is the top-level API:

input := `
# Example for a NestedText dict
a: Hello
b: World
`

result, err := nestext.Parse(strings.NewReader(input))
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal("parsing failed")
}
fmt.Printf("result = %#v\n", result)

will yield:

result = map[string]interface {}{"a":"Hello", "b":"World"}

Clients may use tools like mitchellh/mapstructure or knadh/koanf for further processing.

Encoding

Sub-package ntenc provides an encoder-API:

var config = map[string]interface{}{
    "timeout": 20,
    "ports":   []interface{}{6483, 8020, 9332},
}

n, err := ntenc.Encode(config, os.Stdout)
fmt.Println("------------------------------")
fmt.Printf("%d bytes written, error: %v", n, err != nil)

will yield:

ports:
  - 6483
  - 8020
  - 9332
timeout: 20
------------------------------
46 bytes written, error: false

Status

Tested with NestedText test suite for Version 3.1.0.