SlashCategory is a simple, no frills, human readable file format that is based on data organized into categories, with each piece of data and each category separated by a foward slash (hence the same SlashCategory).
SlashCategory is organized like the following:
category/data/category/data
Although, in reality, there is no distinction between categories and data.
For example, take the example:
book/Lord Of The Flies/author/William Golding
If we want to get the title of the book, we want to get the data under the book category, which would return the data Lord Of The Flies.
But if we want to get the author of the book, Lord Of The Flies just turns into another category, as to get the author of the book, we want to get it under the category book/Lord Of The Flies/author
Each line of data is known as a data entry. For example, there are 6 data entries in the following:
Page/Title/Server Query Info
OmniCraft/Api/ServerQuery/NumPlayers/1
OmniCraft/Api/ServerQuery/MaxPlayers/20
OmniCraft/Api/ServerQuery/Version/1.7.2
OmniCraft/Api/ServerQuery/NumPlayers/1
OmniCraft/Api/Request/Status/Success
There are also comments, which are ignored by the parser:
/data/more data/even more data
# This is a comment
# Comments always start with a # and do not span multiple lines
The format is a relatively simple one. I have built a no-frills PHP parser (because I originally started using this format with web applications). It's pretty easy to use. Just use the getData function:
function getData($data, $pattern);
Where:
$data is the data you want to parse.
$pattern is the category the data you want to retrieve is under.
Here's an example:
<?php
include_once 'SlashCategoryParse.php';
$data = "book/Lord Of The Flies/author/William Golding";
echo "Book Title: " . getData($data, "book")[0] . " Book Author: " . getData($data, "book/Lord Of The Flies/author")[0];
?>
You'll notice that getData() returns an array. This is used if more than one data entry is found under one category, like in the example below:
Page/Title/Book Information
Page/Description/A list of some books and their authors
book/title/Lord Of The Flies/author/William Golding
book/title/Around The World In 80 Days/author/Jules Verne
book/title/Robinson Crusoe/author/Daniel Defoe
There are three data entries under the category book/title. This can be useful. The example below uses this functionality to create a table displaying book names and their respective authors:
<?php
include_once 'data-parse.php';
$data = "Page/Title/Book Information" . "\nPage/Description/A list of some books and their authors" . "\nbook/title/Lord Of The Flies/author/William Golding" . "\nbook/title/Around The World In 80 Days/author/Jules Verne" . "\nbook/title/Robinson Crusoe/author/Daniel Defoe";
$bookTitleArray = getData($data, "book/title");
echo "<h1>" . getData($data, "Page/Title")[0] . "</h1>";
echo "<p><b>" . getData($data, "Page/Description")[0] . "</b></p>";
echo "<table border='1'>";
echo "\n<tr><td>Book Title</td><td>Book Author</td></tr>";
foreach($bookTitleArray as $title)
{
echo "\n<tr>\n";
echo "<td>" . $title . "</td><td>" . getData($data, "book/title/" . $title . "/author")[0] . "</td>";
echo "\n</tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
echo "<p>This page generated from the following data:</p>";
echo "<pre>" . $data . "</pre>";
?>
Which will produce the following HTML page:
I have also successfully used this parser using data retrieved from a cURL request, and a file.
/book/title/Around The World In 80 Days/author/Jules Verne
No Slashes At The Beginning Of A Data Entry
getData($data, "book/title/")
Never put an ending slash at the end of $pattern.
Read FileFormatInfo.md for more information about the file format. This is a must-read if you are interested in using SlashCategory.