Ideas for a modular config file?

[Andy Smith]

Hi folk,

Right now I have a project that has a "bind-style" config file that is
parsed with the aid of flex and bison. It looks a bit like this:

foo {
some_key = "value";
another_key = 42;
};

bar {
you = "get the idea I suspect";
};

In my code, I have structures that would be like this:

struct foo {
char *some_key;
int another_key;
} foosection;

struct bar {
char *you;
} barsection;

Then the parser produced by bison reads the config file and fills in each
section's structure with the relevant values.



All well and good, but now I come to a stage where I want to add module
functionality to this software, and some of the modules I wish to write may
extend the config file syntax.

I'm very new to bison (yacc) and I don't really understand how I might
achieve this, since the syntax of my config file seems to need to be
defined at compile-time whereas modules are obviously a run-time thing.

Might anyone have any tips?

[Måns Rullgård]

Andy Smith <andy-news@strugglers.net> writes:

> Right now I have a project that has a "bind-style" config file that is
> parsed with the aid of flex and bison. It looks a bit like this:
>
> Then the parser produced by bison reads the config file and fills in each
> section's structure with the relevant values.
>
> All well and good, but now I come to a stage where I want to add module
> functionality to this software, and some of the modules I wish to write may
> extend the config file syntax.
>
> I'm very new to bison (yacc) and I don't really understand how I might
> achieve this, since the syntax of my config file seems to need to be
> defined at compile-time whereas modules are obviously a run-time thing.
>
> Might anyone have any tips?

Maybe libtc can be of some use. It has a config file parser with a
similar syntax. The parser will accept any names of keys and reads
the entire file into memory. Then you use some functions to extract
the information you want. The drawback is that you won't catch
spelling errors and the like.

[url]http://libtc.sf.net[/url]

--
Måns Rullgård
[email]mru@users.sf.net[/email]

[Johan den Boer]

Hi,

Maybe XML is an option


"Andy Smith" <andy-news@strugglers.net> schreef in bericht
news:HLvMa.830$0F.6251545@news-text.cableinet.net...

> Hi folk,
>
> Right now I have a project that has a "bind-style" config file that is
> parsed with the aid of flex and bison. It looks a bit like this:
>
> foo {
> some_key = "value";
> another_key = 42;
> };
>
> bar {
> you = "get the idea I suspect";
> };
>
> In my code, I have structures that would be like this:
>
> struct foo {
> char *some_key;
> int another_key;
> } foosection;
>
> struct bar {
> char *you;
> } barsection;
>
> Then the parser produced by bison reads the config file and fills in each
> section's structure with the relevant values.
>
>
>
> All well and good, but now I come to a stage where I want to add module
> functionality to this software, and some of the modules I wish to write

may

> extend the config file syntax.
>
> I'm very new to bison (yacc) and I don't really understand how I might
> achieve this, since the syntax of my config file seems to need to be
> defined at compile-time whereas modules are obviously a run-time thing.
>
> Might anyone have any tips?