Configuration file parser for a somewhat structured properties file format. (The syntax borrows a lot from matjam/StructuredProperties)

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 }