xdg/desktop-file

PHP library for reading, editing and writing XDG desktop files.

Installation

composer require xdg/desktop-file

Desktop file format

The syntax of desktop files is described in detail in the Desktop Entry Specification, but here's a quick summary: desktop files consist of groups of key-value pairs, interspersed with comments.

Several freedesktop.org specifications use this file format, like the Desktop Entry Specification and the Icon Theme Specification.

# This is a comment
[First Group]
Name=Value
SomeString=Example\tthis value shows\nescaping

# localized strings are stored in multiple key-value pairs
Welcome=Hello
Welcome[de]=Hallo
Welcome[fr_FR]=Bonjour
Welcome[it]=Ciao
Welcome[be@latin]=Hello

[Another Group]
IsTheCakeALie=true
TheUniverseAndEverything=42
# lists are delimiter-separated strings:
ListOfNumbers=2;20;-200;0
ListOfBooleans=true;false;true;true

Blank lines are ignored.

Lines beginning with a # are considered comments.

Groups are started by a header line containing the group name enclosed in [ and ], and ended implicitly by the start of the next group or the end of the file. Each key-value pair must be contained in a group.

Key-value pairs generally have the form key=value, except localized strings which have the form key[locale]=value, with a locale identifier of the form lang_COUNTRY@MODIFIER where COUNTRY and MODIFIER are optional. Space characters before and after the = character are ignored. Newline, tab, carriage return and backslash characters in value are escaped as \n, \t, \r, and \\, respectively. To preserve leading spaces in values, these can also be escaped as \s.

Desktop files can store strings (possibly with localized variants), integers, floats, booleans and lists of these. Lists are separated by a separator character, typically ; or ,. To use the list separator character in a value in a list, it has to be escaped by prefixing it with a backslash.

This syntax is obviously inspired by the .ini files commonly met on Windows, but there are some important differences:

• .ini files use the ; character to begin comments, desktop files use the # character.
• Desktop files do not allow for ungrouped keys meaning only comments can precede the first group.
• Desktop files are always encoded in UTF-8.
• Key and group names are case-sensitive. For example, a group called [GROUP] is a different from [group].
• .ini files don't have a strongly typed boolean entry type, they only have GetProfileInt(). In desktop files, only true and false (in lower case) are allowed.

Implementation note

This implementation differs from the Desktop Entry Specification in the following ways:

• groups in desktop files may contain the same key multiple times: the last entry wins.
• Desktop files may also contain multiple groups with the same name: they are merged together.
• Keys and group names in desktop files are not restricted to ASCII characters.