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.
Comment on Everything about TOML format - Orchard Dweller
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 9 months agoTOML is mainly for humans to write, certainly not a good choice if you’re programmatically writing files - comments and formatting would be lost.
Flipper@feddit.de 9 months ago
brettvitaz@programming.dev 9 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 9 months ago
Where do you put your comments in JSON files?
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’ve seen them included as part of the data.
“//”, “Comment goes here”,
spartanatreyu@programming.dev 9 months ago
That doesn’t really work when you need two comments at the same level, since they’d both have the same key
brettvitaz@programming.dev 9 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.
spartanatreyu@programming.dev 9 months ago
How would you mark a flag in your json settings file as deprecated?
suy@programming.dev 9 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).