treetop-dcf

Easy to use parser for Debian Control Files. The format is very similar to YAML, but with some subtle differences (e.g. YAML requires a space after field names, DCF does not).

Parsed paragraphs are returned as hashes in an array. Example:

irb(main):001:0> require "dcf"
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Dcf.parse "Attr: Value"
=> [{"Attr"=>"Value"}]

The parser is currently quite slow, so if the files you're parsing allows it I'd recommend using this YAML based parser instead: http://gist.github.com/117293 Its much faster but fails on certain valid files.

gem install treetop-dcf

This project was created during Google Summer of Code 2009, as part of my project for the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. (CRAN uses DCF for package information, and we needed a parser written in Ruby.) Therefore, a big thanks goes out to both the R Foundation and Google.

Bjørn Arild Mæland <bjorn.maeland at gmail.com>