BespON: Extensible config files with multiline strings, lossless round-tripping, and hex floats

Abstract

BespON is a human-editable data format focused on expressive syntax, lossless round-tripping, and advanced features for scientific and technical tasks. Nested data structures can be represented concisely without multiple levels of either brackets or significant whitespace. The open-source Python implementation of BespON can modify data values while otherwise perfectly preserving config file layout, including comments. BespON also provides doc comments that can be preserved through arbitrary data modification. Additional features include integers (binary, octal, decimal, and hex), floats (decimal and hex, including Infinity and NaN), multiline string literals that only preserve indentation relative to delimiters, and an extensible design that can support user-defined data types.

Keywords:configurationdata serializationdata interchange