Re: Service Provider mechanism and javax.imageio.spi.ServiceRegistry

I see your point.

That's indeed a valid concern -- a convenient representation for
programmatically modifying property files without damaging their
formatting and/or comments.

Actually, while it's not downright a full solution to this is that
starting from Java 5, you can use an XML representation for property
files -- you can use loadFromXML() and storeToXML() to load/save them,
and can manipulate them using SAX/DOM if you wish. Of course, this
doesn't help you with existing properties files...

Attila.

On 2007.11.07., at 23:31, Dilum Ranatunga wrote:

> When programmatically writing properties files out, you also have to
> worry about character encodings. The full 'contract' seems to be
> defined here:
>
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/Properties.html#load(java.io.InputStream)
>
> On that SAX/DOM front, without a complete representation, programmatic
> changes to properties files drop comments and shuffle the keys, making
> diffs very ugly... You are absolutely right about a full SAX
> implementation being an overkill, but similar behavior -- e.g
>
> protected handleCommentLine ( String comment ) { }
>
> protected handleBlankLine ( ) { }
>
> protected handlePair( String key, String value ) {
>  setProperty ( key, value );
> }
>
> on Properties that got invoked by the parser logic in load ( ... )
> would have prevented a lot of heartburn for many a developer.
>
>
> On 11/7/07, Szegedi Attila <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Dunno, having a SAX/DOM for .properties files strikes me as being a
>> bit heavyweight approach...
>>
>> Anyway, the service implementation files aren't required to conform
>> to
>> the full .properties file format IIRC (there are provisions for
>> multiline values and escaping in the properties file format that a
>> parser for service files shouldn't care about). It'd be quite trivial
>> to write a loop around BufferedReader.readLine() and ignore empty
>> lines and those starting with # character if you really cared about
>> ordering.
>>
>> Attila.
>>
>> On 2007.11.07., at 18:54, Dilum Ranatunga wrote:
>>
>>> Speaking of properties files, ordering and comments, does anyone
>>> know
>>> of a readily available SAX handler-like or DOM-like parser for
>>> properties files? (Seems like the right way to have written that
>>> code
>>> in the first place...)
>>>
>>>

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