What other command-line programs have this output format?

Question

I wrote a little program to parse hg log's command-line output, which happens to look like:

changeset:   90:abcdef012345
tag:         tip
user:        me
date:        Sat Apr 30 17:42:05 2011 -0700
summary:     Made another change

changeset:   89:def012345abc
user:        me
date:        Sat Apr 30 16:52:19 2011 -0700
summary:     Made a change

Actually, my program is generic enough to parse any "key: value" pairs, as long as each new record is separated by a blank line.

Now I want to go crazy and try running it against some other (real) data. Is there any other program that generates "key: value" data like this?

Answer 1

With two commands, tr and sed, you can transform it to a more record-like format:

echo 'changeset:   90echo 'changeset:   90:abcdef012345
tag:         tip
user:        me
date:        Sat Apr 30 17:42:05 2011 -0700
summary:     Made another change

changeset:   89:def012345abc
user:        me
date:        Sat Apr 30 16:52:19 2011 -0700
summary:     Made a change
' | tr '\n' ';' | sed 's/;;/\n/' 
changeset:   90:abcdef012345;tag:         tip;user:        me;date:        Sat Apr 30 17:42:05 2011 -0700;summary:     Made another change
changeset:   89:def012345abc;user:        me;date:        Sat Apr 30 16:52:19 2011 -0700;summary:     Made a change;;

However, if it is your format, I would go to a more CSV-like format. You don't need to repeat the headline in every row, and with tabs instead of ';' or ',' (if you don't need tabs as content), you get a format which is very good to parse by hand, to compare rows, to grep rows with grep, and to produce graphs with LibreOffice or to put the data into a database.

If you have a more volatile format, xml might be better - not per se, but because there are so many tools out there.

In Chapter 5 of ESRs writing "The Art of Unix Programming, maybe you find some inspiration for your work.