On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 12:31:00PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > On 2012-12-01 10:16:54 +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 02:18:04AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > > At least for Perl, I can't see anything related to validation. > > > > That's because validating an ini file is trivially easy: > > > > the line is a comment line, which must start with a # after optional > > whitespace, > > or it is a section header, where all data must be surrounded by [], > > or it is a key-value pair, where the key must be one word and be > > separated by the value by a = > > > > or it is invalid. > > No, that's not sufficient.
Of course it is. > You may want relations between key-value pair. For instance, if you > have a line with a key "foo", then a line with a key "bar" must also > exist. Or a line with a key "number" must have a value that is a > number (more generally matching some regexp). That's not validation of the format, that's validation of the data. Something like that is done by the actual code, not by a data format. A library may be able to help, but that's all (and yes, there are plenty of libraries that can do such thing for ini files). > > There, validation. > > > > To validate an XML file, much more is involved, including checks of > > nested tags and escaped characters. > > That's well-formedness (which also corresponds to validation with an > empty schema). > > > > BTW, how do you do nested blocks in .ini files? > > > > You can't, and that's a feature. Instead, you have keys where the > > value is the name of another section (or possibly another ini file) > > containing the "nested" data. > > So, there is a good reason to use XML (or some other format with > similar features) instead of ini: if one needs nested blocks or > may need them in the future. I've never seen any config file with nested config blocks that didn't make the file more complex and less easy to understand. Like I said, that's a feature. -- Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once, add a voucher, and save on postage. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121202210452.go9...@grep.be
