[usrusr]

Yet another tool to parse one large string into a map of smaller strings. Trouble with configuration files is rarely caused by insufficient syntax features, but insufficient schema validation seems to be a consistent source of wtf-moments: a mistyped key here, a duplicate key there, that's what is stealing our time (duplicate key: first definition wins? last definition wins? both get concatenated? doesn't matter, if i was aware of having two of them i would have fixed it in a second).

What i want from a configuration helper library is nothing less than an internal DSL for specifying the typed structure of allowed/expected keys, together with their default values and a short "what is this" description available at runtime. This would be enough to generate nice empty configuration templates and create warnings for unexpected keys (be it from typos or from unexpected duplicates).

Fancy syntax features for the configuration files themselves would be only secondary niceties. And candidates for "stupid" preprocessors ("stupid" in that they would not have to know about the appllicaton's configuration schema).

[cebka]

UCL has support for json schema (http://json-schema.org/) so you can achieve some cool things with it. However, it is apparently not a full DSL.