NestedText: A Human Friendly Data Format¶
NestedText is a file format for holding structured data to be entered, edited, or viewed by people. It organizes the data into a nested collection of dictionaries, lists, and strings without the need for quoting or escaping. A unique feature of this file format is that it only supports one scalar type: strings. While the decision to eschew integer, real, date, etc. types may seem counter intuitive, it leads to simpler data files and applications that are more robust.
NestedText is convenient for configuration files, address books, account information, and the like. Because there is no need for quoting or escaping, it is particularly nice for holding code fragments. Here is an example of a file that contains a few addresses:
# Contact information for our officers
Katheryn McDaniel:
position: president
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
Margaret Hodge:
position: vice president
address:
> 2586 Marigold Lane
> Topeka, Kansas 20682
phone: 1-470-555-0398
email: margaret.hodge@ku.edu
additional roles:
- new membership task force
- accounting task force
One of the more attractive use-cases for NestedText is command line programs
whose output is meant to be consumed by either people or programs. Many
programs do so by supporting a --json command-line flag that indicates the
output should be computer readable rather than human readable. But, with
NestedText it is not necessary to make people choose. Just output the result
in NestedText and it can be read by people or computers. For example,
consider a program that read your address list and output particular fields on
demand:
> address --email
Katheryn McDaniel: KateMcD@aol.com
Margaret Hodge: margaret.hodge@ku.edu
This could output could be fed directly into another program that accepted input as NestedText:
> address --email | mail-to-list
Contributing¶
This package contains a Python reference implementation of NestedText and a test suite. Implementation in many languages is required for NestedText to catch on widely. If you like the format, please consider contributing additional implementations.
Also, please consider using NestedText for any applications you create. It is especially suitable for configuration files.
Language
Python Implementation