Rust UXF Library

Uniform eXchange Format (UXF) is a plain text human readable optionally typed storage format that supports custom types.

UXF is designed to make life easier for software developers and data designers. It directly competes with csv, ini, json, toml, and yaml formats. A key advantage of UXF is its support for custom (i.e., user-defined) types. This can result in more compact, more readable, and easier to parse data. And in some contexts it may prove to be a convenient alternative to sqlite or xml.

Every Uxf object contains one value of type Value: this is always a collection (a List, Map, or Table), which may be empty or contain any number of other values—any mix of scalars and collections.

For details of the Uniform eXchange Format (UXF) supported by this library, see the UXF Overview. (Alternative link to UXF Overview.)

crates.io • docs

Commmand Line tool

The uxf tool can read UXF files (optionally gzip compressed) and lint and output UXF files (optionally gzip compressed; optionally replacing imports and dropping unused ttypes). It can also compare two UXF files for equality or equivalence. (For a full diff, format the two files with the same format options, and use a standard diff tool.)

Feedback

Suggestions, comments, and pull requests for this library are welcome.

Especially useful would be ideas on how to improve the APIs to improve usability.

In this library Uxf objects and all the Values they contain are owned (like String); would it be possible/desirable to have an unsized type (like str)?

Changes

• 1.2.5 Doc improvements.
• 1.2.3 Added Value::naturalize() function to public API. Various minor doc improvements.
• 1.2.2 Added convenience NamedRecord type.
• 1.2.1 More convenience methods.
• 1.2.0 Added push_t() and push_many() convenience methods. Added first_named(), first(), and similar methods to Table.
• 1.1.1 Added more convenience From conversions to Value.
• 1.1.0 Added -D|--decimals to the command line and improved the CLI. Breaking change: the Format type now has realdp as u8 rather than Option<u8>: to fix replace None with 0 and Some(n) with n.
• 1.0.0 Added various convenience methods. For a real-world example, see TLM (Track List Manager) a cross-platform GUI application for managing playlists and playing tracks.
• 0.26.0 Added Uxf::value_mut().
• 0.25.0 Added Uxf::add_tclass().
• 0.24.0 Now correctly writes gzipped to .gz files (before it wrote nothing to these).
• 0.23.0 Bug fixes. Improved error messages & testing.
• 0.22.0 Bug fixes. Improved error messages & testing.
• 0.21.0 Improved error messages & testing.
• 0.20.0 uxf now does linting and comparing; pretty printing complete.
• 0.16.0 More progress towards pretty printing: but at the moment only compact output works (along with parsing of course).
• 0.15.0 Changed uxf CLI to use subcommands: can now do compare, format, and lint (so dropped redundant uxfcmp).
• 0.14.0 Implemented uxfcmp.
• 0.13.0 Cleanups.
• 0.12.0 Parser does everything including imports.
• 0.11.0 Parser does everything except imports; can output unfriendly output.
• 0.2.0 Now use Value::Null rather than Option<Value> since this better represents UXF data.
• 0.1.0 Started.