Config file format

Question

does anyone knows a file format for configuration files easy to read by humans? I want to have something like tag = value where value may be:

• String
• Number(int or float)
• Boolean(true/false)
• Array(of String values, Number values, Boolean values)
• Another structure(it will be more clear what I mean in the fallowing example)

Now I use something like this:

• IntTag=1
• FloatTag=1.1
• StringTag="a string"
• BoolTag=true
• ArrayTag1=[1 2 3]
• ArrayTag2=[1.1 2.1 3.1]
• ArrayTag3=["str1" "str2" "str3"]
• StructTag=
• {
• NestedTag1=1
• NestedTag2="str1"
• }

and so on.

Parsing is easy but for large files I find it hard to read/edit in text editors. I don't like xml for the same reason, it's hard to read. INI does not support nesting and I want to be able to nest tags. I also don't want a complicated format because I will use limited kind of values as I mentioned above.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

What about YAML ? It's easy to parse, nicely structured has wide programming language support. If you don't need the full feature set, you could also use JSON.

Answer 2

Try YAML - is (subjectively) easy to read, allows nesting, and is relatively simple to parse.