About

Valve VDF Key/Value format parser (text and binary).

This format can be found in Steam protobuffer message and in the Steam Client files as well as some Source Engine stuff.

📦 Scoped @xan105 packages are for my own personal use but feel free to use them.

Example

Reading binary VDF .bin file

import { parse } from "@xan105/vdf/binary";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const filePath = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\appcache\\stats\\UserGameStatsSchema_218620.bin";
const buffer = await readFile(filePath);
const vdf = parse(buffer);

Reading text VDF file

import { parse } from "@xan105/vdf";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const filePath = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\appcache\\localization.vdf";
const string = await readFile(filePath, "utf8");
const vdf = parse(string);

Install

npm install @xan105/vdf

API

⚠️ This module is only available as an ECMAScript module (ESM).

Named export

parse(string: string, option?: object): object

Decode the VDF key/value text formatted string into an object.

⚙️ Options

• translate?: boolean | object

  translate option accepts the following object for granular control or a boolean which force all options to true/false:

name	type	default	description
bool	boolean	true	String to boolean
number	boolean	false	String to number or bigint
unsafe	boolean	false	Set to true to keep unsafe integer instead of bigint

❌ Throws on error

Example:

import { parse } from "@xan105/vdf";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const filePath = "steam_input_for_ps4_controller.vdf";
const string = await readFile(filePath, "utf8");

const vdf = parse(string, { translate: {
  bool: true,
  number: true,
  unsafe: false
}});

//All values will be string
const vdf = parse(string, { translate: false });

⚠️ JSON compatibility

Some integers will be represented as BigInt due to their size if the related translate options are used.
BigInt is not a valid value in the JSON spec.
As such when stringify-ing the returned object you'll need to handle the JSON stringify replacer function to prevent it to fail.

A common workaround is to represent them as a string:

JSON.stringify(data, function(key, value) {
  if(typeof value === "bigint")
    return value.toString();
  else
    return value;
});

binary

parse(buffer: Buffer, offset?: number[]): object

Decode the VDF key/value binary formatted buffer into an object (starting at the given offset if any).

NB: offset is an array so it can be passed by reference

❌ Throws on error

Example:

import { parse } from "@xan105/vdf/binary";
import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const filePath = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\appcache\\stats\\UserGameStatsSchema_218620.bin";
const buffer = await readFile(filePath);
const vdf = parse(buffer);

💡 Note that binary ".vdf" file usually requires additional processing like handling file header.

⚠️ JSON compatibility

Some numbers will be represented as BigInt due to their size ((u)int64).
BigInt is not a valid value in the JSON spec.
As such when stringify-ing the returned object you'll need to handle the JSON stringify replacer function to prevent it to fail.

A common workaround is to represent them as a string:

JSON.stringify(data, function(key, value) {
  if(typeof value === "bigint")
    return value.toString();
  else
    return value;
});