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alavrik committed Jul 10, 2011
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20 changes: 20 additions & 0 deletions LICENSE
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Copyright (c) 2011 Anton Lavrik, http://github.com/alavrik

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
104 changes: 104 additions & 0 deletions README
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Erlson - Erlang Simple Object Notation
======================================

Erlson is a dynamic name-value dictionary data type for Erlang.

Erlson dictionaries come with a convenient syntax and can be directly converted
to and from JSON.

Examples:
```
% creating an empty dictionary
X = #{},

% associating field 'foo' with 1 and 'bar' with "abc"
D = #{foo = 1, bar = "abc"},

% accessing dictionary element
1 = D.foo,

% adding nested dictionaries to dictionary D
D1 = D#{baz = #{fum = #{i = 0}}},

% accessing elements of the nested dictionary
0 = D1.baz.fum.i,

% modifying elements of the nested dictionary
D2 = D1#{baz.fum.i = 100, baz.fum.j = "new nested value"}.

...

% converting Erlson dictionary to JSON iolist()
erlson:to_json(D2).

% creating Erlson dictionary from JSON iolist()
D = erlson:from_json(Json).
'''

General properties
------------------

* Erlson dictionaries contain zero or more Name->Value associations
(fields), where each Name is `atom()` or `binary()` and Value can be of
`any()` type.

* Name->Value associations are unique. If a new association is created for the
existing Name, the old value will be replaced by the new value.

* Erlson dictionaries can be nested.


Runtime properties
------------------

* Only fields with `atom()` names can be accessed using the Erlson
dictionary syntax.

* Unlike Erlang records, Erlson dictionaries can be dynamically constructed
without any static type declarations.

* At runtime, Erlson dictionaries are represented as a list of {Name, Value}
tuples ordered by Name. This way, each Erlson dictionary is a valid
`proplist` and `orddict` in terms of the correspondent stdlib modules.

* Erlson dictionaries (dictionary syntax) can't be used as patterns and in
guard expressions.

* Erlson dicts can be used in both compiled modules and Erlang interactive
shell.


Properties related to JSON
--------------------------

* Each valid JSON object can be converted to correspondent Erlson
dictionary.

* An Erlson dictionary can be converted to JSON if it follows JSON data
model.

* JSON->Erlson->JSON conversion should produces an equivalent JSON object
(fields will be reordered).


Usage instructions
-----------------

For compiled modules that use Erlson syntax, the Erlson library header must be
included:

-include_lib("erlson/include/erlson.hrl").


When rebar is used as a build tool, it should be configured to use
"erlson_rebar_plugin". In order to do that, add the following line to the
project's "rebar.config" file:

{rebar_plugins, [erlson_rebar_plugin]}.


In order to use Erlson syntax from Erlang shell, run the following command (e.g.
include it in `.erlang` file):

erlson:init().

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