On 06.09.2011 10:20, Ruediger Berlich wrote:
Hi there,
by trying it out with a modified debug_settings example, I can see that property_tree accepts Javascript ("//") comments inside of the JSON files it parses.
I want to find out whether it makes sense to use JSON as an alternative to boost.program_options for configuration files. The idea would be to use a JavaScript-based GUI to modify or create the configuration files in a comfortable way and to use the same files as input for my C++-based programs.
As my configuration files are auto-generated by my objects and not everybody loves GUIs, I need to be able to add comments to a property_tree object, so that they are emitted during a "write_json" call.
The easiest way to add comments to the config files would be to just add a "comment" data member. This would indeed be very useful for the JavaScript usecase, as comments can be integrated into the GUI / Browser, and would still give guidance to those wanting to modify the JSON files with a standard editor. However, this does not help me to write things like a header, or to add information targeted only at those who modify the files by hand. For these I still need to be able to generate "//"-style comments.
From the documentation I could not find out whether this can be done in a standard and portable way. Any pointer would be very welcome!
This is not possible with PTree as it is. While I think the ability to represent and preserve comments would be interesting to quite a few users, I must admit that I have no idea how to implement such a functionality in a nice way. Sebastian