Cookbooks
Bash
Chapter 10. Data Formats and Serialization
Working with TOML

Bash:
Working with TOML

How to:

First up, install toml-cli to play with TOML in Bash. Handy for reading or editing TOML files on the fly.

# Install toml-cli, our little helper for TOML tasks
pip install toml-cli

# Imagine you've got a TOML file, 'config.toml'
echo -e 'title = "TOML Demo"\n\n[owner]\nname = "Tom"\ndob = 1979-05-27T07:32:00Z' > config.toml

# Read a value
toml get config.toml owner.name
# Output: Tom

# Set a value
toml set config.toml 'owner.dob' '2000-01-01T00:00:00Z'
# Pro tip: Use quotes for keys with dots or funky chars!

Deep Dive

Born from the dislike of JSON’s hurdles for humans, TOML dropped around 2013. Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder, wanted something super legible. YAML and INI were alternatives but TOML’s like the best of both.

Shebang, you’ve got nested data and arrays, minus YAML’s foot guns and JSON’s curly braces. TOML’s now a go-to for config in Rust’s Cargo, which speaks to its rise in the dev world. It’s driven by a spec, keeping things tight and well-defined. You’ll nab parsers in almost any language, making it widely adoptable.

See Also

Working with JSONWorking with XML