Shell script reading/formatting config file

Question

I've searched a few places and didn't find one for my needs, basically here's the config:

name1 = value1;
name2= value2
name3 =value3 // comments

name4=value4 //empty line above and/or below

I need a shell script that reads the config file and parse all the name / value pairs with starting/trailing semicolons/spaces removed and comments as well as empty lines ignored.

I first tried

while read -r name value
do
echo "Content of $name is ${value//\"/}"
done < $1

I tried to trim name and value by:

"${var//+([[:space:]])/}"

but still not sure how to remove the semicolon and ignore the empty lines and comments?

You are asking us wriite a complete parser for an incompletely specified file format? In shell script? Seriously? — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 5:36
A somewhat more sane approach would be to preprocess the input to remove comments and value-final semicolon terminators, and normalize whitespace. Then the rest is extremely easy. — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 5:37
@tripleee Yes I see, the format is just what's in the first quoted part, name value pairs separated by equal sign, with optional spaces and comments. — Heuristic
– Heuristic, Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 5:47
If you are fine with a Bash solution, replace < $1 (which should properly be < "$1") with something like < <(sed -e '/^$/d' -e 's%[[:space:]]*//.*%%' -e 's/;$//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*/ /' "$1") — tripleee
– tripleee, Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 5:52
Or why worry about a "parser", just change the comment identifiers to #, remove the spaces on either side of the = sign, and then source config.file into your script... That would make a lot more sense... — David C. Rankin
– David C. Rankin, Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 6:10

yacc · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-17 11:53:28Z

1

This is where IFS could be used. You'll have to rely on sed, however, and assume a well-formed config file. No multiline values like that.

parseconf() {
  sed -e 's/^[ ;]*//' \
      -e 's/[ ;]*$//' \
      -e 's/\/\/.*//' \
      -e 's/ *= */=/' $1 \
  | while IFS="=" read -r name value
  do
    [ -n "$name" ] && echo "name=$name value=$value"
  done
}
parseconf $1

edited Oct 17, 2015 at 11:53

answered Oct 15, 2015 at 4:40

yacc

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