What is Open-RJ?

Version 1.6.2

Intro | The Open-RJ format | Getting Started

What is Open-RJ?

This is a simple library to support the Record-Jar format (so named in the excellent The Art Of UNIX Programming), which is a simple, loosely structured format supporting multiple records with variable fields.

The Open-RJ format

Each ORJFieldA field is a name value pair, where the name is the whitespace-trimmed leftmost portion of the line, preceeding the colon separator. The value is the white-space trimmed remainder of the line. Values may extend over multiple lines by use the the \ line continuation character.

It has the following features:

• %% starts a comment line
• blank lines are ignored
• \ continues the line onto the next
• whitespace is trimmed from the beginning and end of all lines, except prior to the line continuation character
• there is no requirement for records to have the same number of fields, or fields with the same names
• records may contain more than one field with the same name

and, as of version 1.4:

• optional case-insentive field-name lookup
• support for field-name aliasing

The format looks like the following:

     %% Books data 
     %% Created:   28th June 2004
     %% Updated:   29th June 2004
     Author:       Donald E. Knuth
     Title:        Art of Computer Programming, The, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms
     Publisher:    Addison-Wesley
     Year:         1997
     Description:
     %% 
     Author:       Eric Raymond
     Title:        Art of UNIX Programming, The 
     Url:          http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0131429019
     Publisher:    Addison-Wesley
     Year:         2003
     Description:  This is a great book if you want to learn about the \
                   history of UNIX. It inspired the \
                   <a href = "../libraries/index.html#openrj">Open-RJ</a> project
     %% 
     Author:       Rector and Sells
     Title:        ATL Internals
     Publisher:    Addison-Wesley
     Year:         1999
     Description:
     %% 
 

Hence, the value of the Description field in the second non-empty record (which is the fifth record of any type), is:

This is a great book if you want to learn about the history of UNIX. It inspired the <a href = "../libraries/index.html#openrj">Open-RJ</a> project

Open-RJ Library documentation © Synesis Software Pty Ltd, 2004-2005