json.lua VS serpent

One option might be to look at the Path of Building “Data” folder. If you need them in another format (e.g. json), it wouldn’t be that hard to write a Lua script to export them in your preferred format (using this json library, for example.

If you don't want to reinvent the wheels, you might want a json encoder to transform data into strings and back. Or bitser if you want better performance and smaller files in exchange for human-readability.

Honestly, I just went with JSON because there's a nice Lua library for it (thank you https://github.com/rxi/json.lua).

I haven't thought about the file format much so far, just the experience of writing in it as if it's the "ground truth". We all seldom open our text files in a hex editor.

JSON https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

Get json.lua from here. Put it in your project directory alongside file1.lua.

Good point. How about this? It allows you to encode/decode Lua values into/from JSON.

I like this json library and tend to use it for save files (also makes them easy to edit by hand while debugging). It gets angry if you use tables with a mix of string and numerical keys, but I'd advise against that anyway. I've also used binser, which is also effective and easy to use.

lua json module can be found from here: https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

Judging by the name, output is intended to be processed by https://github.com/pkulchenko/serpent

Maybe you could just serialize your data to a lua file (instead of sql), and read it back as a normal table - and vice versa? If so maybe something like serpent would be of use. It functions as you describe in your last paragraph. I use it just as you describe (i think) for some scripts. Imo lua is perfectly suitable for data storage/retrieval. I figure unless I have a good reason to use something more traditional eg `json` or `sql`, why not just use lua?