Introduction

This document specifies the mxt file format. The mxt format is designed to mix diffent file formats in one text file. A pracitcal use case are situations there you must work with multiple text files that have different file formats.

Notation and Conventions

The extension of a mxt file should be .mxt.

The main structure in a mxt file is a list of chunks. A chunk is subdivided via a 'newline' into a header and content part.

The content represents the content of a text file that is embedded in the mxt file.

The header contains the name of the chunk and an optional comment section as information. Furthermore has a header the mxt specific elements marker, arrow and the optional salt for the next header.

A minimum header needs a marker, name and arrow element.

// name.of.chunk -->

The marker marks the end of the previous content and the begining of the header. It starts with '//' followed by a optional salt value that must match the salt of the previous header. All bytes till the next 'space' will be interpretet as marker.

The following name must be a 'word'. A 'word' is character sequence with unicode values > 'U+0020'.

The arrow element can be any 'word' that has the character sequence '-->' at the end and not inside the word.

//salt++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Σ-element ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-->

The optional comment in a header can span other several lines until it reaches an arrow element. Each of this lines must start with '//'. A parser should replace the the 'newline' and '//' with a simple 'space'. Lines that contain only a '//' at the start should be replaced with a 'newline'.

The following header should lead to the comment string 'This is the\ncomment.'.

// filename This
// is the
//
// comment.
//-------------->

The second optional element in the header is the salt value. It should be used if the content contains '//' at the beginning of a line. The salt value itself can be any 'word'.

Definition of Keywords:

  • newline = (U+000D)U+000A

  • // = U+002F U+002F

  • space = U+0020

  • --> = U+002D U+002D U+003E

  • word = * > U+0020

Example

The following example shows how a complete mxt file can look.

example.mxt
//---------------------------------------------------------------- user.json -->
{
   "user": "alucard",
   "password": "C:SotN1997"
}
//--------------------------------------------------------------- connection.ini
// comment line that is not part of the ini file,
// comment lines will be joined with a space character
//
// empty comment lines will generate a newline character in the comment
//----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
request: GET

[url]
schema=http
host=localhost
port=8080
path=/db/add
// user.pgp --> XYZ
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
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=WxK9
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
//XYZ hello-world.h -->
//---------------------------------------------------------- hello-world.c --> X
// this is part of hello-world.c
#include<stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("Hello World\n");
    return 0;
}

Implementations

A reference implementation in Lua is part of LuaZDF[1]

Lua
Go

References