Skip to main content

like mime, but simpler - a simple, human-readable file format Simple I/O to flat text files with a header (composed of fields) and a body (arbitrary bytes). Ideal for no-hassle storage of some metadata and some large data that doesn't fit nicely into things like JSON (which becomes really hard to edit in a text editor if there's a 2 MB blob of numbers somewhere in it).

Project description

like mime, but simpler - a simple, human-readable file format

Simple I/O to flat text files with a header (composed of fields) and a body (arbitrary bytes). Ideal for no-hassle storage of some metadata and some large data that doesn’t fit nicely into things like JSON (which becomes really hard to edit in a text editor if there’s a 2 MB blob of numbers somewhere in it).

While the general format is the same as MIME/”internet messages” and most if not all “internet messages” can be parsed by this module there are a few distinctions. For starters the header is always UTF-8 encoded (which doesn’t clash with the 7-bit-ASCII-padded-to-bytes used by internet messages). Field names are mangled to Python identifiers by stripping surrounding whitespace and dashes, turning them all lower case, replacing dashes (-) with underscores (_) and appending another underscore if the result is a reserved Python keyword. If the result of this is not a valid Python identifier, the field name is invalid.

When writing files from objects this translation is reversed (underscores replaced with dashes, surrounding dashes are removed and the result is title-cased).

Values are simple strings.

The optional body of a file is, in contrast to the header, not UTF-8, but rather treated as a byte string. If the body is text-like usage of UTF-8 is strongly advised.

Line endings in the header can be UNIX style (n, preferred) or Windows style (rn). Windows style endings are always converted to UNIX style endings when reading, and only UNIX style endings are written.

Primary APIs are dump, dumps, load and loads.

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

limbs-0.4.tar.gz (3.7 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

File details

Details for the file limbs-0.4.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: limbs-0.4.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 3.7 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No

File hashes

Hashes for limbs-0.4.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 433894b8b1628d9f7f412586244b5e4485fba19405548404c5442c0d67f784d7
MD5 2788c214ee4aeb322ed7a87f3677ce97
BLAKE2b-256 8650efcc6f52cad86f6847989eb729db7e6ae6468a2e47df13977d374d7349cd

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page