lua-patterns VS toml.io

If you want automatic built-in string validation, one option that seems particularly interesting is to use a variant of Lua patterns, which are weaker and easier to understand than regular expressions, but still provide a significant degree of "sanity" for something like an email. The original version works on bytes and not runes, but you could simply write a parser that works on runes instead, and the pattern-matching code is just 400 old and battle-tested lines of C89.

Lua patterns have also shown up in other places, such as BSD's httpd, and an implementation for Rust:

https://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=7&topic=PATTERNS

https://github.com/stevedonovan/lua-patterns

http://lua-users.org/wiki/PatternsTutorial

Key links: - Homepage: https://marzer.github.io/tomlplusplus/ - Repository: https://github.com/marzer/tomlplusplus - "What is TOML?": https://toml.io/

Yeah, I find the whitespacing really annoying. I recommend TOML instead - it's much nicer.

That's why TOML exists. It's like INI, but standardized, has arrays, dictionaries and multiline strings. And it's not a nightmare to implement like YAML, which has a 23449-word spec (TOML has 3339)