EEP - Configuration Files

Configuration Files

Introduction
General EEP 3.x Configuration Style
- Specification
- Example
"X-Resource" or "Application-Default" Files

Introduction

EEP configuration files are text files which contain the parameters for the different evaluation modules. The syntax depends on the module. For historical reasons, it is not very consistent. Nevertheless there are some common rules:

one-line comments are started with ";"
configuration files are evaluated case-insensitive (except of filenames and other case-sensitive keywords for external communication)
sample configurations are available
The newer configurations without compatibility constraints have an uniform style. Examples for the old style are cntepoch, cntreject, cntdetrend, cntaverage. Examples for the new style are xeog, avrretrieve.

General EEP 3.x Configuration Style

The configuration is always splitted into sections, each containing a variable length list of items. This preprocessing is done by one standard lexer. Each module has to parse only the items from the sections it is interested in.

Specification

This is for reference. The example below is more explanative.

configuration_file: sequence of sections, comments and empty lines in any order
comment: everything between a semicolon character and a newline, inclusive
section: section_title newline item_list
section_title: opening brace [, section_key, closing brace ], newline
whitespaces are allowed before, between, behind the elements above
section_key: any string made of whitespaces,letters, digits and underscore
item_list: list of items, separated by comma, newline or both
item: any string (can contain ,;[] characters only if enclosed in double quotes)
whitespaces: any combination of space and/or tab characters

Example

; note the different item separations here: comma, newline or both
[Channels]
F1, F2, F3
F4,
F5
F6

; the EEP configuration format supports only one-line comments
; but there is a simple trick to comment out a whole section
;  - just make the section keyword invalid
[rem Channels]
P1, P2, P3, 
P4, P5, P6

; you can format your text using whitespaces
[  My     Calculation   Factor           ] 
     0.0345        ,

; double quotes allow to have the special characters ",;[]" 
; in configuration items 
[objects]
text  txt:"Hello, world! [what a text]"

"X-Resource" or "Application-Default" Files

As all other X-Toolkit based programs, the graphical EEP modules (xcnt, xavr, ...) have an additional powerful configuration mechanism - the resource database.