SPUG: Ordered Hash Tie Class

Ingmar Ellenberger iee2 at site42.com
Tue Apr 6 13:48:35 CDT 2004


On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 10:34, Chris Wilkes wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:03:13AM -0700, Ingmar Ellenberger wrote:
> > I need it to be able to handle multiple values for a given key and have
> > handlers to deal with them.
> > 
> > What I'm REALLY trying to do is create tools to manipulate Java property
> > files while while maintaining comments and whitespace.
> 
> Can you have multiple values for a single key in java property files?

Sort of, but not really.  I'm no Java expert, but I believe it works
this way.  Java treats these properties as constants, so it takes the
first instance of a property and ignores all others.  That makes the
order you load properties files rather important.  I find the whole
thing a little backward - must have been designed be committee.

I was planning to parse out all comments into a single '_comment' key in
the hash 'cause I really don't care about the (contents of the)
comments.  I just want to make sure that as I add values and merge
files, the comments would also go with it so that the Java developers
wouldn't get all confused.

> Most of mine look like this:
>    # this is a comment
>    # remote directory
>    remotedir=/home/qubert/files
> 
>    # username for scp
>    username=blah
> 
> as for whitespace, I haven't seen that in use either, ...

When saying whitespace, I meant blank lines in addition to comments.  I
would presume that whitespace in properties would be preserved.

> I take it eventually you want to get to something like this:
>   $prop = My::JavaProperty->new("clothingreport.properties");
>   @keys = $prop->getKeys();
>   $columns = $prop->get("columns");
>   $columns++;
>   $prop->set("columns", $columns);
>   $prop->save();

That's pretty much it.  Also wanted to be able to merge multiple
property files as well.

> What I would do is slurp everything into an array (as property files are
> never that long) and then when someone requests a key, just go through
> the array looking for it, keeping track of its position in the array.
> Then when they change it, just change that position's value.

That was my original thought, but I was aiming to be a little more
fancy.

> And I could of saved myself a lot of time by looking on CPAN first, as
> there's a Config::Properties module out there:
>   http://search.cpan.org/~salva/Config-Properties-0.56/Properties.pm
> so I would see if that suits your needs.

Took a quick look at it, and from reading the code, it seems to ignore
all comments (i.e. doesn't preserve them).  I could be missing something
though.  The code isn't as clearly written as it could be.





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