QuickFennec.CST

Caret-Separated Text (or CST) is a key-value pair format represented by numbers or words as keys and the value is the string enclosed between carets that contains the contents. (e.g. <key> ^<value>^) Any text which is not enclosed with carets is considered a comment and ignored. Neither strings nor comments may use the caret character.

QuickFennec.CST is a library for parsing the CST format. Though, production version were capable of

Usage

1 ^The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.^

#r "nuget:CSTNet,1.0.1"
using System;
using System.IO;
using CSTNet;

var file = File.ReadAllText("example.cst");
var example = CaretSeparatedText.Parse(file, 1);

Console.WriteLine(example);

See working example on .NET Fiddle.

In production, CST files were used in The Sims Online to provide translations. Each translation was split into their respective directories:

• uitext/english.dir/misc/_154_miscstrings.cst
• uitext/swedish.dir/misc/_154_miscstrings.cst

QuickFennec.CST only provides the basic parsing functionality.

To-do

• Support for arguments (e.g. %1)

Known issues

• Skipping comments is a little buggy.
• Multiline parsing with the v2 format is still unpredictable.

Requirements

Prerequisites

• .NET 5+ or Core 3.1
• .NET Interactive for notebooks
  • VSCode Extension (does not require Jupyter)
  • nteract (requires Jupyter)

License

I license this project under the MIT license - see LICENSE for details.