Introducing NestedText 3.0, a nice alternative to JSON, YAML, TOML

NestedText is a new file format for holding data that is to be entered, edited, or viewed by people. It allows data to be organized into a nested collection of dictionaries, lists, and strings without the need for quoting or escaping. In this way it is similar to JSON and YAML, but without the complexity and risk of YAML and without the syntactic clutter of JSON. NestedText is both simple and natural. Only a small number of concepts and rules must be kept in mind when creating it. It is easily created, modified, or viewed with a text editor and easily understood and used by both programmers and non-programmers.

NestedText is convenient for configuration files, address books, account information and the like. Here is an example of the first entry from a file that
contains an address book:

# Contact information for our officers

president:
name: Katheryn McDaniel
address:
> 138 Almond Street
> Topeka, Kansas 20697
phone:
cell: 1-210-555-5297
home: 1-210-555-8470
# Katheryn prefers that we always call her on her cell phone.
email: KateMcD@aol.com
additional roles:
- board member
- new membership task force
- accounting task force

The format holds dictionaries (ordered collections of name/value pairs), lists (ordered collections of values) and strings (text) organized hierarchically to any depth. Indentation is used to indicate the hierarchy of the data, and
a simple natural syntax is used to distinguish the types of data in a simple and
intuitive manner. Specifically, lines that begin with a word or words followed by a colon are dictionary items; a dash introduces list items, and a leading greater-than symbol signifies a line in a multiline string. Dictionaries and lists are used for nesting; the leaf values are always strings. However, *NestedText* pairs nicely with *voluptuous* to add data validation and transformation.

Currently there is a Python implementation and a language independent test suite.

Documentation: https://nestedtext.org
Install: pip install nestedtext
Support: https://github.com/KenKundert/nestedtext/issues

Give it a try.
-Ken

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