datanode API

A personal implementation of a configuration file format and parser

Building

A mock test.txt file and main.cpp are included for your benefit. This project is not designed to be stand-alone and benefits most from inclusion in other codebases. Nevertheless, you can build the mock project with the included Makefile. The following make directives are provided:

• make clean: removes an existing ./build/ directory and all of its contents
• make all / make: creates the build directory and compiles to datanode / datanode.exe

Usage

Inclusion

#include "datanode.h"
#include "parser.h"

Creation

A datanode is a recursive node object which can either contain a std::variant<std::string, int, double> or another datanode

The following c++ code will create a datanode structure equivilent to that seen in test.txt:

datanode d;
d["config_node"]["some_field"] = "value";
d["config_node"]["some_field2"] = 2;
d["other_config_node"]["other_field"] = 3.14;
d["other_config_node"]["other_subconfig"]["sub_field"] = "2";

Note the use of the overridden operator[] which will either access a sub-datanode by name if it exists, or create one if it does not.

Saving

// save to file
d.save("file/location/here");
// or save to other ostream object
d.save(std::cout);

Loading

// load from file
datanode d = parser::load("file/location/here");
// or load from other istream object
d = parser::load(std::cin);

Parser notes

• Ignores horizontal whitespace unless enclosed in double quotes, e.g. a field containing a string value such as sub_field = "2"
• Does NOT ignore vertical whitespace. Newlines are syntactically important!
• If a parse error is encountered, a parse_exception will be thrown.