Comment on Everything about TOML format - Orchard Dweller
brettvitaz@programming.dev 8 months ago
Every time I have reached for TOML I have ended up using JSON. The first reason is that Python standard library can read but not write TOML, which is generally useless for me. The second reason is all values are strings. The third reason is TOML does not add any benefit over JSON. It’s not that much easier to read and IMO JSON is easier to write by hand because the syntax rules are completely obvious.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
TOML is mainly for humans to write, certainly not a good choice if you’re programmatically writing files - comments and formatting would be lost.
brettvitaz@programming.dev 8 months ago
So it’s good for things that don’t change, or things you have to change by hand, which gives it almost zero utility for any project that I’ve worked on.
spartanatreyu@programming.dev 8 months ago
Where do you put your comments in JSON files?
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve seen them included as part of the data.
“//”, “Comment goes here”,brettvitaz@programming.dev 8 months ago
For settings files I always have an example file with sensible values filled in and along with descriptive keys that serves as reasonable documentation. If something is truly unknowable, I’ve probably done something wrong.
suy@programming.dev 8 months ago
The very first moment that I had to use JSON as a configuration format, and I was desperate to find a way to make a long string into a JSON field. JSON is great for many things, but it’s not good at all for a configuration format where you need users to make it pretty, and need features like comments or multi-line strings (because you don’t want to fix a merge conflict in a 400 character-wide line).
Flipper@feddit.de 8 months ago
It all depends on the library you use. Rust has you covered with toml_edit. It is what is used for all the cargo commands editing the Cargo.toml file.