Re: Reading a conf file

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Russell Haley once stated:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm trying to read and write to a conf file (i.e. each line is an
> item, and key/value pair is separated by '='). I found that penlight
> has an excellent parser, but it seems a little heavy importing that
> whole thing  to parse character separated lines. 

  [ snip ]

> I'm not familiar enough with line matching patterns or lpeg to be
> effective (seriously. every time I've tried to 'fix' a reg-ex in C# I wind
> up breaking it beyond repair). While these are both things I desperately
> want to learn, I'm trying to get a working prototype of my software
> together and stopping to learn lpeg is not where I want to be at this
> time(but I promise to do it!).

  I'll spare you the "you should learn regex/lpeg" line as it appears you
already know it.

> Any feedback would be dandy.

  You already have a parser available to you---Lua.  If the config file is
just what you said:

	a=series
	of=key
	value=pairs

A small change:

	a='series'
	of='key'
	value='pairs'
	and_a_number=3

and that can be read in as:

	CONF = {} -- your data will end up here
	f = loadfile("my-configfile.txt","t",CONF)
	f()

	print(CONF.a,CONF.and_a_number)

  I use Lua as a configuration file at work and there have been no issue
with that.

  -spc