Acquire / file · All operations

Read a configuration file

A variant of Read another file format

Read a YAML, TOML, properties or INI file into rows.

Status

In arcform

Not built yet

arcform does not do this yet. Its place on the roadmap

What other tools call it

Meridian's classification; an independent blind rating agreed on 95.7% of 324 rows (variant, version 3).

Apache Hop (2)
  • Properties file Inputread 2026-09-27

    Read key and value pairs from Java properties or INI files

  • Yaml Inputread 2026-09-27

    Read YAML from files or a field and emit rows

Apache NiFi (1)
  • YamlTreeReaderread 2026-09-27

    Read YAML into records by walking the document tree

Duckle (2)
  • TOMLread 2026-09-25

    read a TOML document as a single row

  • YAMLread 2026-09-25

    read a YAML document as rows, one per top-level array element

Pentaho Data Integration (2)
  • Property Inputread 2026-09-27

    Read key and value pairs from properties files

  • Yaml Inputread 2026-09-27

    Read YAML from a file or field and emit rows

Talend (1)
VisiData (2)

Background

A configuration file stores data used to configure a software system, such as an application, a server or an operating system.[1] An INI file, named for the INI filename extension, short for initialisation, is a plain-text configuration file of key–value pairs in sections.[2] YAML is a human-readable data serialisation language that is commonly used for configuration files.[3]

When to use it

INI is an informal format, and many varying specifications of it exist, called INI dialects, where sometimes a parser implementation is the only specification ever written.[2] INI interpretations differ on details such as whitespace preservation, field type information, case sensitivity and preferred comment delimiters.[2] Contrary to the INI format, Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (TOML) has a formally agreed-upon syntax.[4]

Read configuration values as text first, and cast only the keys whose type you know. (Meridian's view) .properties is a file extension for files mainly used in Java-related technologies to store an application's configurable parameters, or localised strings, known as property resource bundles.[5] Before Java 9, the encoding of a .properties file was ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1.[5] In Java 9 and newer, the default encoding for property resource bundles is UTF-8, falling back to ISO-8859-1 when an invalid UTF-8 byte sequence is encountered.[5] Ask which program reads a configuration file, and read it the way that program does, since its dialect is the one that counts. (Meridian's view)

The method

INI-flavoured implementations typically share a text file with a key–value pair on each line, delimited by an equals sign, organised into sections denoted by square brackets.[2] In an INI file the delimiter between key and value is most often an equals sign, but sometimes a colon or whitespace.[2] A Java .properties file stores each parameter as a pair of strings, one storing the name of the parameter, called the key, and the other storing its value.[5] A line of a .properties file may take the form key=value, key = value, key:value or key value.[5]

TOML's syntax primarily consists of key-value pairs, section names in square brackets, and comments delimited by a leading #.[4] TOML supports the data types string, integer, float, boolean, datetime, array and table.[4] YAML uses Python-style indentation to indicate nesting.[3] In YAML, lists and hashes can contain nested lists and hashes, forming a tree structure.[3] To read a YAML file into rows, decide which level of its tree a row stands for, and keep the path of keys above it as columns. (Meridian's view)

Compared with the alternatives

TOML is designed to be easy to read and write by being minimal, unlike the more complex YAML.[4]

Sources

  1. [1]Configuration file - Wikipediasecondary source
  2. [2]INI file - Wikipediasecondary source
  3. [3]YAML - Wikipediasecondary source
  4. [4]TOML - Wikipediasecondary source
  5. [5].properties - Wikipediasecondary source