The PortaLinux Project

The PortaLinux Markup Language Specification 1.1

The PortaLinux Markup Language, PLML for short, is a simple markup language that is mainly used for configuring PortaLinux system software, such as pl-srv and some other programs within pl-coreutils.

The PLML syntax is based on TOML. PLML is basically an attempt to simplify TOML into an INI-like language. Because of PLML being a subset of TOML, any PLML file is a valid TOML file and can be parsed by any TOML parsing library.

Syntax

The PLML syntax only has three types of tokens:

• Header: Starts with '[', ends with ']'. Header cannot have spaces.
• Example: [header]
• Variable: Follows the 'name = value' format. Name cannot have spaces, and value must be an integer, string, boolean, decimal or array.
• Example (Integer): variable = 1234
• Example (String): variable = "basic string" or variable = 'literal string'
• There are two types of strings. Basic (starts and end with double quotes) or literal (starts and ends with single quotes). PLML treats them both as a string, this is only a parser distinction.
• Example (Boolead): variable = true or variable = false
• Example (Decimal): variable = 123.456
• Example (Array): variable = [ 123, 1999, 6502 ] or variable = [ 123.456, 23.45, 1.25 ] or [ "string1", 'string2', "string3" ]
• PLML arrays, just like TOML arrays, do not allow for multiple data types to be stored in an array
• Unlike TOML arrays, PLML arrays cannot be multidimensional
• Comment: Starts with a pound sign and anything past that character gets ignored by the parser
• Example: name = 123 # This will get ignored by the parser :3

Example file

This is an example PLML file that shows all the features of this TOML subset:

        
          # This is an example PLML File
          [example-header]
          property1 = "test string 123" # Basic string
          property2 = 1234 # Integer
          property3 = true # Boolean
          property4 = 1.5 # Float
          property5 = [ 123, 2011, 6502 ] # Array