kdl/SPEC.md

KDL Spec

This is the semi-formal specification for KDL, including the intended data model and the grammar.

This document describes KDL version 1.0.0-pre.0.

Introduction

KDL is a node-oriented document language. Its niche and purpose overlaps with XML, and as do many of its semantics. You can use KDL both as a configuration language, and a data exchange or storage format, if you so choose.

The bulk of this document is dedicated to a long-form description of all Components of a KDL document. There is also a much more terse Grammar at the end of the document that covers most of the rules, with some semantic exceptions involving the data model.

KDL is designed to be easy to read and easy to implement.

Components

Document

The toplevel concept of KDL is a Document. A Document is composed of zero or more Nodes, separated by newlines and whitespace, and eventually terminated by an EOF.

All KDL documents should be UTF-8 encoded and conform to the specifications in this document.

Example

The following is a document composed of two toplevel nodes:

foo {
    bar
}
baz

Node

Being a node-oriented language means that the real core component of any KDL document is the "node". Every node must have a name, which is either a legal Identifier, or a quoted String.

Following the name are zero or more Arguments or Properties, separated by either whitespace or a slash-escaped line continuation. Arguments and Properties may be interspersed in any order, much like is common with positional arguments vs options in command line tools.

Arguments are ordered relative to each other and that order must be preserved in order to maintain the semantics.

By contrast, Property order SHOULD NOT matter to implementations. Children should be used if an order-sensitive key/value data structure must be represented in KDL.

Nodes MAY be prefixed with /- to "comment out" the entire node, including its properties, arguments, and children, and make it act as plain whitespace, even if it spreads across multiple lines.

Finally, a node is terminated by either a Newline, a Children Block, a semicolon (;) or the end of the file/stream (an EOF).

Example

foo 1 key="val" 3 {
    bar
    baz
}

Identifier

A bare Identifier is composed of any unicode codepoint other than non-initial characters, followed by any number of unicode codepoints other than non-identifier characters, so long as this doesn't produce something confusable for a Number. Identifiers are terminated by Whitespace or Newlines.

Non-initial characters

The following characters cannot be the first character in a bare Identifier:

• Any decimal digit (0-9)
• Any non-identifier characters

Non-identifier characters

The following characters cannot be used anywhere in a bare Identifier:

• Any codepoint with hexadecimal value 0x20 or below.
• Any codepoint with hexadecimal value higher than 0x10FFFF.
• Any of "\/<>{};=,""

Line Continuation

Line continuations allow Nodes to be spread across multiple lines.

A line continuation is one or more whitespace characters, followed by a \ character. This character can then be followed by more whitespace and must be terminated by a Newline (including the Newline that is part of single-line comments).

Following a line continuation, processing of a Node can continue as usual.

Example

my-node 1 2 \  // comments are ok after \
        3 4    // This is the actual end of the Node.

Property

A Property is a key/value pair attached to a Node. A Property is composed of an Identifier or a String, followed immediately by a =, and then a Value.

Properties should be interpreted left-to-right, with rightmost properties with identical names overriding earlier properties. That is:

node a=1 a=2

In this example, the node's a value must be 2, not 1.

No other guarantees about order should be expected by implementers. Deserialized representations may iterate over properties in any order and still be spec-compliant.

Properties MAY be prefixed with /- to "comment out" the entire token and make it act as plain whitespace, even if it spreads across multiple lines.

Argument

An Argument is a bare Value attached to a Node, with no associated key. It shares the same space as Properties.

A Node may have any number of Arguments, which should be evaluated left to right. KDL implementations MUST preserve the order of Arguments relative to each other (not counting Properties).

Arguments MAY be prefixed with /- to "comment out" the entire token and make it act as plain whitespace, even if it spreads across multiple lines.

Example

my-node 1 2 3 "a" "b" "c"

Value

A value is either: a String, a Raw String, a Number, a Boolean, or Null

Values MUST be either Arguments or values of Properties.

String

Strings in KDL represent textual Values. They are delimited by " on either side of any number of literal string characters except unescaped " and \. This includes literal Newline characters, which means a String Value can encompass multiple lines without behaving like a Newline for Node parsing purposes.

Strings MUST be represented as UTF-8 values.

In addition to literal code points, a number of "escapes" are supported. "Escapes" are the character \ followed by another character, and are interpreted as described in the following table:

Name	Escape	Code Pt
Line Feed	\n	U+000A
Carriage Return	\r	U+000D
Character Tabulation (Tab)	\t	U+0009
Reverse Solidus (Backslash)	\\	U+005C
Solidus (Forwardslash)	\/	U+002F
Quotation Mark (Double Quote)	\"	U+0022
Backspace	\b	U+0008
Form Feed	\f	U+000C
Unicode Escape	\u{(1-6 hex chars)}	Code point described by hex characters, up to 10FFFF

Raw String

Raw Strings in KDL are much like Strings, except they do not support \-escapes. They otherwise share the same properties as far as literal Newline characters go, and the requirement of UTF-8 representation.

Raw String literals are represented as r, followed by zero or more # characters, followed by ", followed by any number of UTF-8 literals. The string is then closed by a " followed by a matching number of # characters. This means that the string sequence " or "# and such must not match the closing " with the same or more # characters as the opening r.

Example

just-escapes r"\n will be literal"
quotes-and-escapes r#"hello\n\r\asd"world"#

Number

Numbers in KDL represent numerical Values. There is no logical distinction in KDL between real numbers, integers, and floating point numbers. It's up to individual implementations to determine how to represent KDL numbers.

There are four syntaxes for Numbers: Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal, and Binary.

• All numbers may optionally start with one of - or +, which determine whether they'll be positive or negative.
• Binary numbers start with 0b and only allow 0 and 1 as digits, which may be separated by _. They represent numbers in radix 2.
• Octal numbers start with 0o and only allow digits between 0 and 7, which may be separated by _. They represent numbers in radix 8.
• Hexadecimal numbers start with 0x and allow digits between 0 and 9, as well as letters A through F, in either lower or upper case, which may be separated by _. They represent numbers in radix 16.
• Decimal numbers are a bit more special:
  • They have no radix prefix.
  • They use digits 0 through 9, which may be separated by _.
  • They may optionally include a decimal separator ., followed by more digits.
  • They may optionally be followed by E or e, an optional - or +, and more digits, to represent an exponent value.

Boolean

A boolean Value is either the symbol true or false. These SHOULD be represented by implementation as boolean logical values, or some approximation thereof.

Example

my-node true value=false

Null

The symbol null represents a null Value. It's up to the implementation to decide how to represent this, but it generally signals the "absence" of a value. It is reasonable for an implementation to ignore null values altogether when deserializing.

Example

my-node null key=null

Whitespace

The following characters should be treated as non-Newline white space:

Name	Code Pt
Character Tabulation	U+0009
Space	U+0020
No-Break Space	U+00A0
Ogham Space Mark	U+1680
En Quad	U+2000
Em Quad	U+2001
En Space	U+2002
Em Space	U+2003
Three-Per-Em Space	U+2004
Four-Per-Em Space	U+2005
Six-Per-Em Space	U+2006
Figure Space	U+2007
Punctuation Space	U+2008
Thin Space	U+2009
Hair Space	U+200A
Narrow No-Break Space	U+202F
Medium Mathematical Space	U+205F
Ideographic Space	U+3000

Newline

The following characters should be treated as new lines:

Acronym	Name	Code Pt
CR	Carriage Return	U+000D
LF	Line Feed	U+000A
CRLF	Carriage Return and Line Feed	U+000D + U+000A
NEL	Next Line	U+0085
FF	Form Feed	U+000C
LS	Line Separator	U+2028
PS	Paragraph Separator	U+2029

Note that for the purpose of new lines, CRLF is considered a single newline.

Full Grammar

nodes := linespace* (node nodes?)? linespace*

node := ('/-' ws*)? identifier (node-space node-space* node-props-and-args)* (node-space* node-children ws*)? node-space* node-terminator
node-props-and-args := ('/-' ws*)? (prop | value)
node-children := ('/-' ws*)? '{' nodes '}'
node-space := ws* escline ws* | ws+
node-terminator := single-line-comment | newline | ';' | eof

identifier := string | bare-identifier
bare-identifier := (identifier-char - digit - sign) identifier-char* | sign ((identifier-char - digit) identifier-char*)?
identifier-char := unicode - linespace - [\/(){}<>;[]=,"]
prop := identifier '=' value
value := string | number | boolean | 'null'

string := raw-string | escaped-string
escaped-string := '"' character* '"'
character := '\' escape | [^\"]
escape := ["\\/bfnrt] | 'u{' hex-digit{1, 6} '}'
hex-digit := [0-9a-fA-F]

raw-string := 'r' raw-string-hash
raw-string-hash := '#' raw-string-hash '#' | raw-string-quotes
raw-string-quotes := '"' .* '"'

number := decimal | hex | octal | binary

decimal := integer ('.' [0-9]+)? exponent?
exponent := ('e' | 'E') integer
integer := sign? [0-9] [0-9_]*
sign := '+' | '-'

hex := sign? '0x' hex-digit (hex-digit | '_')*
octal := sign? '0o' [0-7] [0-7_]*
binary := sign? '0b' ('0' | '1') ('0' | '1' | '_')*

boolean := 'true' | 'false'

escline := '\\' ws* (single-line-comment | newline)

linespace := newline | ws | single-line-comment

newline := See Table (All line-break white_space)

ws := bom | unicode-space | multi-line-comment

bom := '\u{FFEF}'

unicode-space := See Table (All White_Space unicode characters which are not `newline`)

single-line-comment := '//' ^newline+ newline
multi-line-comment := '/*' (commented-block | multi-line-comment) '*/'
commented-block := ('*' [^\/] | [^*])*