Papers › Designing text representations for existing data using the TextFormats Specification Language
Designing text representations for existing data using the TextFormats Specification Language
Giorgio Gonnella
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
TextFormats is a software system for efficient and user-friendly creation of text format specifications, accessible from multiple programming languages (C/C++, Python, Nim) and the Unix command line. To work with a format, a specification written in the TextFormats Specification Language (TFSL) must be created. The specification defines datatypes for each part of the format. The syntax for datatype definitions in TextFormats specifications is based on the text representation. Thus this system is well suited for the description of existing formats. However, when creating a new text format for representing existing data, the user may use different possible definitions, based on the type of value and the representation choices. This study explores the possible definition syntax in the TextFormats Specification Language to be used for creating text representations of scalar values (e.g. string, numeric value, boolean) and compound data structures (e.g. array, mapping). The results of the analysis are presented systematically, together with examples for each each type of different values that can be represented, and usage advices.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections