Internet Multi-line Width-Limited Record Database Format
The iMWLRDB, or the MWLR format for short, is an attempt to generalise the data formats used by iCalendar (RFC 2445 and successors), Email (RFC 2822 et. al) vCard (RFC 6350) and Usenet (RFC 850 et. al), into a customsiable and extensible database format.
These databases are text files containing one or more records. Each record contains fields which begin on a new line. Each line in the file begins with a field name, followed by a separator symbol before the field value. Records may be nested, and multiple values may be crammed into a single field.
The databases do not have to be structured; each record in a database need not contain the same fields.
Lines have a width limit; there must be at least one line break every maximum number of bytes, while continuing lines optionally begin with a start-of-line sequence before the value content.
This mini-project was also an attempt at functional programming in Python. Functional Python isn't as pretty as Haskell, but it's pretty usable!
For now there is only a means of converting dict's into database files, some unit tests, and sample databases.
A database deserialiser to read files back into dict's will be added at a later date.
For detailed specifications, please refer to SPECS.rst in the repository's root directory. A small collection of sample databases may be found in the demo.py module.
All code is licensed under the terms and conditions of the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The specifications (SPECS.rst) are licensed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.