Valve Data Files

Parse Valve's VDF or KeyValues format. VDF files are similar to JSON and are used to store hierarchical metadata on resources, scripts, materials, etc. Request functions such as request_webapi allow VDF as a response format. For most use cases in data analysis, the VDF format should not have any advantages over JSON.

parse_vdf(x, check_types = TRUE)

Arguments

x

A string containing a KeyValues or VDF body.

check_types

Whether to automatically detect types and try to convert them to R objects. By default, the KeyValues format only knows strings.

Details

The parsing algorithm follows the official documentation of the Valve developer community wiki. The basic structure knows three control characters: {, }, and \". Double quotes signify a key or a value. A key can either be followed by a value or by a curly bracket indicating the beginning of a new nesting level. Accordingly, a key can hold either a length-1 value or a named list.

Lines beginning with # are interpreted as macros and are omitted. Comments (beginning with // or /*) end a line and remove everything up to the end of the line. Expressions in square brackets are omitted (based on recommendations from here).

Examples

# example vdf
vdf <- '"someresource" [$WIN]
{
  "foo" "bar" // Some comment
  "odd" "record" [$ODD]
  "someotherresource"
  {
    "baz" "tar"
  }
}'

parse_vdf(vdf)
#> $someresource
#> $someresource$foo
#> [1] "bar"
#> 
#> $someresource$odd
#> [1] "record"
#> 
#> $someresource$someotherresource
#> $someresource$someotherresource$baz
#> [1] "tar"
#> 
#> 
#> 

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# vdf from web API
vdf <- request_webapi(
  api = public_api(),
  interface = "IStoreService",
  method = "GetTagList",
  version = "v1",
  params = list(language = "english"),
  format = "vdf"
)

parse_vdf(vdf)
} # }