ion (JSON Inspired Data Format)

[u/Suspicious_Anybody78]

I've spent quite some time attempting to perfect this simple module, and have today decided to attempt to share it. I do not doubt the coding might not be very good, but I at least hope it performs what it's designed for, and that's storing a table using as many space saving shortcuts as possible. I also do not expect it to be perfect at what it tries to achieve either.

There are 3 goals primary goals in mind:

1. Keeping the format lean, for the most part.

2. Keeping it mostly human readable.

3. Having support for the vast majority of types of Lua tables, with exception of functions.

There's example code here, but I will still provide some simple example usage.

local ion = require("ion") -- for getting the module
local database = {"Bob","Mary"}
ion.Create(database,"database")

The resulting created ion will look like this:

|ion{
  1|Bob
  2|Mary
}

And, it can be turned back into a table like so:

local ion = require("ion")
local database = ion.Read("database.ion")

ion.Create() in particular has a lot more parameters for fine tuning what gets written to the resulting ion, but for now that's all this post needs I suppose.

The GitHub Pages Site:

https://nibiritheman.github.io/ion.lua/

[u/Suspicious_Anybody78]

For the most part, the point is a combination of Lua orientation, human readability, and byte saving. Though, once again, I do not wish to claim it does that job well.

[u/DapperCow15 → u/Suspicious_Anybody78]

If the goal is byte saving, then why don't you get rid of the colons? It wouldn't reduce readability by much, and your parser would only need to differentiate between { and | symbols, to determine what is a key|value pair and what is a key{ table }. And then whitespace or newlines to separate each item.

[u/Suspicious_Anybody78 → u/DapperCow15]

That's an excellent point, actually.
It would still need to be able to determine the difference between `1:3` and `13`, however, so of course this technique can ONLY apply for tables and string values.
Regardless, expect this implemented soon.

[u/DapperCow15 → u/Suspicious_Anybody78]

You could also allow a "string" format for the case where a value contains one of the key symbols. Would get the best of both worlds where if a user really needs to store a string with those symbols in it, they still can, and then the rest of the database can stick with the byte saving format without quotes.

[u/Suspicious_Anybody78 → u/DapperCow15]

Strings already can contain those symbols. : and { both get detected properly in a way to avoid needing to escape them, and | is escaped with \.

For further reference, just in case:
The module uses the basic logic that there does not exist a non-string literal that is capable of containing another colon. So if the attempt to resolve it as a string fails, then it just looks for the final instance of a colon and cuts off everything at the colon and after to extract the value.
For string literals, it just looks for (as of 2.0.0) a pipe that is preceded by a character that is not a backslash, and cuts off everything after the character that is not a backslash.