Plugin: mini

• infos = Information about the mini plugin is in keys below
• infos/author = René Schwaiger sanss.nosp@m.ecou.nosp@m.rs@me.nosp@m..com
• infos/licence = BSD
• infos/needs = ccode
• infos/provides = storage/ini
• infos/recommends =
• infos/placements = getstorage setstorage
• infos/status = maintained shelltest unittest nodep limited
• infos/metadata =
• infos/description = A minimal plugin for simple INI files

mINI

The “maybe this is not INI” plugin (mini) is a very simple storage plugin loosely based on the INI file format. Since this plugin does not support sections it might be more appropriate to say that it is based on the .properties format, used in many Java applications.

Examples

Basic Usage

The following example shows basic usage of the mini plugin.

`` @section autotoc_md407 Mount mini plugin touser/tests/mini` sudo kdb mount mini.ini user/tests/mini mini

Add two key value pairs to the database

kdb set user/tests/mini/key value #> Create a new key user/tests/mini/key with string "value" kdb set user/tests/mini/mi/mi/mr beaker #> Create a new key user/tests/mini/mi/mi/mr with string "beaker"

Export our current configuration

kdb export user/tests/mini mini #> key=value #> mi/mi/mr=beaker

Manually add some values

echo "🔑 = 🦄" >> kdb file user/tests/mini echo "level1/level2 = 👾" >> kdb file user/tests/mini

Now <tt>user/tests/mini</tt> contains four key value pairs

kdb ls user/tests/mini #> user/tests/mini/key #> user/tests/mini/level1/level2 #> user/tests/mini/mi/mi/mr #> user/tests/mini/🔑

Let us check if <tt>user/tests/mini/🔑</tt> contains the correct value

kdb get "user/tests/mini/🔑" #> 🦄

Undo modifications to the key database

kdb rm -r user/tests/mini sudo kdb umount user/tests/mini

### Escaping
 
As with most configuration file formats, some characters carry special meaning. In the case of the `mini` plugin that character are
 
1. the `=` sign, which separates keys from values and
2. `#` and `;`, the characters that denote a comment.
 
In case of **key values** you do not need to care about the special meaning of these characters most of the time, since the plugin handles escaping and unescaping of them for you. Since mINI use the backslash character (`\`) to escape values, the backspace character will be escaped too (`\\`). The following example shows the escaping behavior.

sudo kdb mount mini.ini user/tests/mini mini

Store a value containing special characters

kdb set user/tests/mini/key ';#=\' #> Create a new key user/tests/mini/key with string ";#=\"

The actual file contains escaped version of the characters

kdb file user/tests/mini | xargs cat #> key=\;#=\

However, if you retrieve the value you do not have to care

about the escaped characters

kdb get user/tests/mini/key #> ;#=\

If we do not escape the <tt>;</tt> and <tt>#</tt> characters, then they

donate a comment.

echo 'background = #0F0F0F ; Background color' >> kdb file user/tests/mini echo 'foreground = #FFFFFF # Foreground color' >> kdb file user/tests/mini kdb get user/tests/mini/background #> #0F0F0F kdb get user/tests/mini/foreground #> #FFFFFF

Undo modifications to the key database

kdb rm -r user/tests/mini sudo kdb umount user/tests/mini

In the case of **key names** you **must not use any of the characters mentioned above** (`;`, `#` and `=`) at all. Otherwise the behavior of the plugin will be **undefined**.
 
## Limitations
 
This plugin only supports simple key-value based properties files without sections. mINI also does not support metadata. If you want a more feature complete plugin, then please take a look at the [ini plugin](@ref src_plugins_ini_README_md). The example below shows some of the limitations of the plugin.

sudo kdb mount mini.ini user/tests/mini mini

The plugin does not support sections or multi-line values

echo '[section]' >> kdb file user/tests/mini printf 'key="multi\nline"' >> kdb file user/tests/mini

mINI only reads the first line of the value with the name <tt>key</tt>, since

the plugin assigns no special meaning to double or single quotes.

kdb ls user/tests/mini 2> stderr.txt #> user/tests/mini/key

As we can see in the first two line of the standard error output below,

mINI will inform us about lines it was unable to parse.

cat stderr.txt | grep -oE 'Line [[:digit:]]+.*' | sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//' #> Line 1: '[section]' is not a valid key value pair #> Line 3: 'line"' is not a valid key value pair

Unlike the <tt>ini</tt> and <tt>ni</tt> plugin, mINI does not support metadata.

kdb meta-ls user/tests/mini

RET: 1

The value of <tt>key</tt> also contains the double quote symbol, since mINI does

not assign special meaning to quote characters.

kdb get user/tests/mini/key #> "multi

Undo modifications

rm stderr.txt kdb rm -r user/tests/mini sudo kdb umount user/tests/mini ```