HOCON specification¶

HOCON (application/hocon) is the Human Optimized Config Object Notation. It's a superset of JSON that's used to configure Conveyor. This document is a simplified and cleaned up version of the spec. The canonical version of the spec can be found here.

Conveyor extensions¶

On top of the base HOCON spec Conveyor adds additional features like brace expansion in string lists, per-user default files, access to environment variables and the ability to include the results of external programs. This lets you make dynamic configs that are partly or completely computed on the fly.

Goals / Background¶

The primary goal is: keep the semantics (tree structure; set of types; encoding/escaping) from JSON, but make it more convenient as a human-editable config file format.

The following features are desirable, to support human usage:

less noisy / less pedantic syntax
ability to refer to another part of the configuration (set a value to another value)
import/include another configuration file into the current file
a mapping to a flat properties list such as Java's system properties
ability to get values from environment variables
ability to write comments

Implementation-wise, the format should have these properties:

a JSON superset, that is, all valid JSON should be valid and should result in the same in-memory data that a JSON parser would have produced.
be deterministic; the format is flexible, but it is not heuristic. It should be clear what's invalid and invalid files should generate errors.
require minimal look-ahead; should be able to tokenize the file by looking at only the next three characters. (right now, the only reason to look at three is to find "//" comments; otherwise you can parse looking at two.)

HOCON is significantly harder to specify and to parse than JSON. Think of it as moving the work from the person maintaining the config file to the computer program.

Definitions¶

a key is a string JSON would have to the left of : and a value is anything JSON would have to the right of :. i.e. the two halves of an object field.
a value is any "value" as defined in the JSON spec, plus unquoted strings and substitutions as defined in this spec.
a simple value is any value excluding an object or array value.
a field is a key, any separator such as ':', and a value.
references to a file ("the file being parsed") can be understood to mean any byte stream being parsed, not just literal files in a filesystem.

Unchanged from JSON¶

Much of this is defined with reference to JSON; you can find the JSON spec at https://json.org/ of course.

files must be valid UTF-8
quoted strings are in the same format as JSON strings
values have possible types: string, number, object, array, boolean, null
allowed number formats matches JSON; as in JSON, some possible floating-point values are not represented, such as NaN

Comments¶

Anything between // or # and the next newline is considered a comment and ignored, unless the // or # is inside a quoted string.

Omit root braces¶

JSON documents must have an array or object at the root. Empty files are invalid documents, as are files containing only a non-array non-object value such as a string. In HOCON, if the file does not begin with a square bracket or curly brace, it is parsed as if it were enclosed with {} curly braces. A HOCON file is invalid if it omits the opening { but still has a closing }; the curly braces must be balanced.

Key-value separator¶

The = character can be used anywhere JSON allows :, i.e. to separate keys from values. If a key is followed by {, the : or = may be omitted. So "foo" {} means "foo" : {}

Commas¶

Values in arrays, and fields in objects, need not have a comma between them as long as they have at least one ASCII newline (\n, decimal value 10) between them.

The last element in an array or last field in an object may be followed by a single comma. This extra comma is ignored.

[1,2,3,] and [1,2,3] are the same array.
[1\n2\n3] and [1,2,3] are the same array.
[1,2,3,,] is invalid because it has two trailing commas.
[,1,2,3] is invalid because it has an initial comma.
[1,,2,3] is invalid because it has two commas in a row.
these same comma rules apply to fields in objects.

Whitespace¶

The JSON spec simply says "whitespace"; in HOCON whitespace is defined as follows:

any Unicode space separator (Zs category), line separator (Zl category), or paragraph separator (Zp category), including nonbreaking spaces (such as 0x00A0, 0x2007, and 0x202F). The BOM (0xFEFF) must also be treated as whitespace.
tab (\t 0x0009), newline ('\n' 0x000A), vertical tab ('\v' 0x000B), form feed (\f' 0x000C), carriage return ('\r' 0x000D), file separator (0x001C), group separator (0x001D), record separator (0x001E), unit separator (0x001F).

In Java, the isWhitespace() method covers these characters with the exception of nonbreaking spaces and the BOM. While all Unicode separators should be treated as whitespace, in this spec "newline" refers only and specifically to ASCII newline 0x000A.

Duplicate keys and object merging¶

The JSON spec does not clarify how duplicate keys in the same object should be handled. In HOCON, duplicate keys that appear later override those that appear earlier, unless both values are objects. If both values are objects, then the objects are merged.

Note

This would make HOCON a non-superset of JSON if you assume that JSON requires duplicate keys to have a behavior. The assumption here is that duplicate keys are invalid JSON.

To merge objects:

add fields present in only one of the two objects to the merged object.
for non-object-valued fields present in both objects, the field found in the second object must be used.
for object-valued fields present in both objects, the object values should be recursively merged according to these same rules.

Object merge can be prevented by setting the key to another value first. This is because merging is always done two values at a time; if you set a key to an object, a non-object, then an object, first the non-object falls back to the object (non-object always wins), and then the object falls back to the non-object (no merging, object is the new value). So the two objects never see each other.

These two are equivalent:

{
    "foo" : { "a" : 42 },
    "foo" : { "b" : 43 }
}

{
    "foo" : { "a" : 42, "b" : 43 }
}

And these two are equivalent:

{
    "foo" : { "a" : 42 },
    "foo" : null,
    "foo" : { "b" : 43 }
}

{
    "foo" : { "b" : 43 }
}

The intermediate setting of "foo" to null prevents the object merge.

Unquoted strings¶

A sequence of characters outside of a quoted string is a string value if:

it does not contain "forbidden characters": '$', '"', '{', '}', '[', ']', ':', '=', ',', '+', '#', '`', '^', '?', '!', '@', '*', '&', '\' (backslash), or whitespace.
it does not contain the two-character string "//" (which starts a comment)
its initial characters do not parse as true, false, null, or a number.

Unquoted strings are used literally, they do not support any kind of escaping. Quoted strings may always be used as an alternative when you need to write a character that is not permitted in an unquoted string.

truefoo parses as the boolean token true followed by the unquoted string foo. However, footrue parses as the unquoted string footrue. Similarly, 10.0bar is the number 10.0 then the unquoted string bar but bar10.0 is the unquoted string bar10.0. (In practice, this distinction doesn't matter much because of value concatenation; see later section.)

In general, once an unquoted string begins, it continues until a forbidden character or the two-character string "//" is encountered. Embedded (non-initial) booleans, nulls, and numbers are not recognized as such, they are part of the string. An unquoted string may not begin with the digits 0-9 or with a hyphen (-, 0x002D) because those are valid characters to begin a JSON number. The initial number character, plus any valid-in-JSON number characters that follow it, must be parsed as a number value. Again, these characters are not special inside an unquoted string; they only trigger number parsing if they appear initially.

Note that quoted JSON strings may not contain control characters (control characters include some whitespace characters, such as newline). This rule is from the JSON spec. However, unquoted strings have no restriction on control characters, other than the ones listed as "forbidden characters" above. Some of the "forbidden characters" are forbidden because they already have meaning in JSON or HOCON, others are essentially reserved keywords to allow future extensions to this spec.

Multi-line strings¶

Multi-line strings are similar to Python or Scala, using triple quotes. If the three-character sequence """ appears, then all Unicode characters until a closing """ sequence are used unmodified to create a string value. Newlines and whitespace receive no special treatment. Unlike Scala, and unlike JSON quoted strings, Unicode escapes are not interpreted in triple-quoted strings.

In Python, """foo"""" is a syntax error (a triple-quoted string followed by a dangling unbalanced quote). In Scala, it is a four-character string foo". HOCON works like Scala; any sequence of at least three quotes ends the multi-line string, and any "extra" quotes are part of the string.

Value concatenation¶

The value of an object field or array element may consist of multiple values which are combined. There are three kinds of value concatenation:

if all the values are simple values (neither objects nor arrays), they are concatenated into a string.
if all the values are arrays, they are concatenated into one array.
if all the values are objects, they are merged (as with duplicate keys) into one object.

String value concatenation is allowed in field keys, in addition to field values and array elements. Objects and arrays do not make sense as field keys.

String value concatenation¶

String value concatenation is the trick that makes unquoted strings work; it also supports substitutions (${foo} syntax) in strings. Only simple values participate in string value concatenation. Recall that a simple value is any value other than arrays and objects. As long as simple values are separated only by non-newline whitespace, the whitespace between them is preserved and the values, along with the whitespace, are concatenated into a string. String value concatenations never span a newline, or a character that is not part of a simple value.

A string value concatenation may appear in any place that a string may appear, including object keys, object values, and array elements. Whenever a value would appear in JSON, a HOCON parser instead collects multiple values (including the whitespace between them) and concatenates those values into a string. Whitespace before the first and after the last simple value must be discarded. Only whitespace between simple values must be preserved.

Example

foo bar baz parses as three unquoted strings, and the three are value-concatenated into one string. The inner whitespace is kept and the leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed. The equivalent string, written in quoted form, would be "foo bar baz". Value concatenating foo bar (two unquoted strings with whitespace) and quoted string "foo bar" would result in the same in-memory representation, seven characters.

For purposes of string value concatenation, non-string values are converted to strings as follows (strings shown as quoted strings):

true and false become the strings "true" and "false".
null becomes the string "null".
quoted and unquoted strings are themselves.
numbers should be kept as they were originally written in the file. For example, if you parse 1e5 then you might render it alternatively as 1E5 with capital E, or just 100000. For purposes of value concatenation, it should be rendered as it was written in the file.
a substitution is replaced with its value which is then converted to a string as above.
it is invalid for arrays or objects to appear in a string value concatenation.

A single value is never converted to a string. That is, it would be wrong to value concatenate true by itself; that should be parsed as a boolean-typed value. Only true foo (true with another simple value on the same line) should be parsed as a value concatenation and converted to a string.

Array and object concatenation¶

Arrays can be concatenated with arrays, and objects with objects, but it is an error if they are mixed. For purposes of concatenation, "array" also means "substitution that resolves to an array" and "object" also means "substitution that resolves to an object."

Within an field value or array element, if only non-newline whitespace separates the end of a first array or object or substitution from the start of a second array or object or substitution, the two values are concatenated. Newlines may occur within the array or object, but not between them. Newlines between prevent concatenation.

For objects, "concatenation" means "merging", so the second object overrides the first. Arrays and objects cannot be field keys, whether concatenation is involved or not.

Here are several ways to define a to the same object value:

// one object
a : { b : 1, c : 2 }
// two objects that are merged via concatenation rules
a : { b : 1 } { c : 2 }
// two fields that are merged
a : { b : 1 }
a : { c : 2 }

Here are several ways to define a to the same array value:

// one array
a : [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
// two arrays that are concatenated
a : [ 1, 2 ] [ 3, 4 ]
// a later definition referring to an earlier
// (see "self-referential substitutions" below)
a : [ 1, 2 ]
a : ${a} [ 3, 4 ]

A common use of object concatenation is "inheritance":

data-center-generic = { cluster-size = 6 }
data-center-east = ${data-center-generic} { name = "east" }

A common use of array concatenation is to add to paths:

path = [ /bin ]
path = ${path} [ /usr/bin ]

Note

When concatenating substitutions such as ${foo} ${bar}, the substitutions may turn out to be strings (which makes the whitespace between them significant) or may turn out to be objects or lists (which makes it irrelevant). Unquoted whitespace must be ignored in between substitutions which resolve to objects or lists. Quoted whitespace should be an error.

Arrays without commas or newlines¶

Arrays allow you to use newlines instead of commas, but not whitespace instead of commas. Non-newline whitespace will produce concatenation rather than separate elements.

// this is an array with one element, the string "1 2 3 4"
[ 1 2 3 4 ]
// this is an array of four integers
[ 1
  2
  3
  4 ]

// an array of one element, the array [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ]
[ [ 1, 2 ] [ 3, 4 ] ]
// an array of two arrays
[ [ 1, 2 ]
  [ 3, 4 ] ]

If this gets confusing, just use commas. The concatenation behavior is useful rather than surprising in cases like:

[ This is an unquoted string my name is ${name}, Hello ${world} ]
[ ${a} ${b}, ${x} ${y} ]

Non-newline whitespace is never an element or field separator.

Path expressions¶

Path expressions are used to write out a path through the object graph. They appear in two places; in substitutions, like ${foo.bar}, and as the keys in objects like { foo.bar : 42 }.

Path expressions are syntactically identical to a value concatenation, except that they may not contain substitutions. This means that you can't nest substitutions inside other substitutions, and you can't have substitutions in keys.

When concatenating the path expression, any . characters outside quoted strings are understood as path separators, while inside quoted strings . has no special meaning. So foo.bar."hello.world" would be a path with three elements, looking up key foo, key bar, then key hello.world.

The main tricky point is that . characters in numbers do count as a path separator. When dealing with a number as part of a path expression, it's essential to retain the original string representation of the number as it appeared in the file (rather than converting it back to a string with a generic number-to-string library function).

10.0foo is a number then unquoted string foo and should be the two-element path with 10 and 0foo as the elements.
foo10.0 is an unquoted string with a . in it, so this would be a two-element path with foo10 and 0 as the elements.
foo"10.0" is an unquoted then a quoted string which are concatenated, so this is a single-element path.
1.2.3 is the three-element path with 1,2,3

Unlike value concatenations, path expressions are always converted to a string, even if they are just a single value.

If you have an array or element value consisting of the single value true, it's a value concatenation and retains its character as a boolean value.

If you have a path expression (in a key or substitution) then it must always be converted to a string, so true becomes the string that would be quoted as "true".

If a path element is an empty string, it must always be quoted. That is, a."".b is a valid path with three elements, and the middle element is an empty string. But a..b is invalid and should generate an error. Following the same rule, a path that starts or ends with a . is invalid and should generate an error.

Paths as keys¶

If a key is a path expression with multiple elements, it is expanded to create an object for each path element other than the last. The last path element, combined with the value, becomes a field in the most-nested object.

In other words:

foo.bar : 42

is equivalent to:

foo { bar : 42 }

and:

foo.bar.baz : 42

is equivalent to:

foo { bar { baz : 42 } }

and so on. These values are merged in the usual way; which implies that:

a.x : 42, a.y : 43

is equivalent to:

a { x : 42, y : 43 }

Because path expressions work like value concatenations, you can have whitespace in keys:

a b c : 42

is equivalent to:

"a b c" : 42

Because path expressions are always converted to strings, even single values that would normally have another type become strings.

true : 42 is "true" : 42
3 : 42 is "3" : 42
3.14 : 42 is "3" : { "14" : 42 }

As a special rule, the unquoted string include may not begin a path expression in a key, because it has a special interpretation (see below).

Substitutions¶

Substitutions are a way of referring to other parts of the configuration tree.

The syntax is ${pathexpression} or ${?pathexpression} where the pathexpression is a path expression as described above. This path expression has the same syntax that you could use for an object key.

The ? in ${?pathexpression} must not have whitespace before it; the three characters ${? must be exactly like that, grouped together.

For substitutions which are not found in the configuration tree, implementations may try to resolve them by looking at system environment variables or other external sources of configuration. (More detail on environment variables in a later section.)

Substitutions are not parsed inside quoted strings. To get a string containing a substitution, you must use value concatenation with the substitution in the unquoted portion:

key : ${animal.favorite} is my favorite animal

Or you could quote the non-substitution portion:

key : ${animal.favorite}" is my favorite animal"

Substitutions are resolved by looking up the path in the configuration. The path begins with the root configuration object, i.e. it is "absolute" rather than "relative."

Substitution processing is performed as the last parsing step, so a substitution can look forward in the configuration. If a configuration consists of multiple files, it may even end up retrieving a value from another file.

If a key has been specified more than once, the substitution will always evaluate to its latest-assigned value (that is, it will evaluate to the merged object, or the last non-object value that was set, in the entire document being parsed including all included files).

If a configuration sets a value to null then it should not be looked up in the external source. Unfortunately there is no way to "undo" this in a later configuration file; if you have { "HOME" : null } in a root object, then ${HOME} will never look at the environment variable. There is no equivalent to JavaScript's delete operation in other words.

If a substitution does not match any value present in the configuration and is not resolved by an external source, then it is undefined. An undefined substitution with the ${foo} syntax is invalid and should generate an error.

If a substitution with the ${?foo} syntax is undefined:

if it is the value of an object field then the field should not be created. If the field would have overridden a previously-set value for the same field, then the previous value remains.
if it is an array element then the element should not be added.
if it is part of a value concatenation with another string then it should become an empty string; if part of a value concatenation with an object or array it should become an empty object or array.
foo : ${?bar} would avoid creating field foo if bar is undefined. foo : ${?bar}${?baz} would also avoid creating the field if both bar and baz are undefined.

Substitutions are only allowed in field values and array elements (value concatenations), they are not allowed in keys or nested inside other substitutions (path expressions).

A substitution is replaced with any value type (number, object, string, array, true, false, null). If the substitution is the only part of a value, then the type is preserved. Otherwise, it is value-concatenated to form a string.

Self-Referential Substitutions¶

The big picture:

substitutions normally "look forward" and use the final value for their path expression
when this would create a cycle, when possible the cycle must be broken by looking backward only (thus removing one of the substitutions that's a link in the cycle)

The idea is to allow a new value for a field to be based on the older value:

path : "a:b:c"
path : ${path}":d"

A self-referential field is one which:

has a substitution, or value concatenation containing a substitution, as its value
where this field value refers to the field being defined, either directly or by referring to one or more other substitutions which eventually point back to the field being defined

Examples of self-referential fields:

a : ${a}
a : ${a}bc
path : ${path} [ /usr/bin ]

Note that an object or array with a substitution inside it is not considered self-referential for this purpose. The self-referential rules do not apply to:

a : { b : ${a} }
a : [${a}]

These cases are unbreakable cycles that generate an error. (If "looking backward" were allowed for these, something like a={ x : 42, y : ${a.x} } would look backward for a nonexistent a while resolving ${a.x}.)

A possible implementation is:

substitutions are resolved by looking up paths in a document. Cycles only arise when the lookup document is an ancestor node of the substitution node.
while resolving a potentially self-referential field (any substitution or value concatenation that contains a substitution), remove that field and all fields which override it from the lookup document.

The simplest form of this implementation will report a circular reference as missing; in a : ${a} you would remove a : ${a} while resolving ${a}, leaving an empty document to look up ${a} in. You can give a more helpful error message if, rather than simply removing the field, you leave a marker value describing the cycle. Then generate an error if you return to that marker value during resolution.

Cycles should be treated the same as a missing value when resolving an optional substitution (i.e. the ${?foo} syntax). If ${?foo} refers to itself then it's as if it referred to a nonexistent value.

The `+=` field separator¶

Fields may have += as a separator rather than : or =. A field with += transforms into a self-referential array concatenation, like this:

a += b

becomes:

a = ${?a} [b]

+= appends an element to a previous array. If the previous value was not an array, an error will result just as it would in the long form a = ${?a} [b]. Note that the previous value is optional (${?a} not ${a}), which allows a += b to be the first mention of a in the file (it is not necessary to have a = [] first).

Examples of Self-Referential Substitutions¶

In isolation (with no merges involved), a self-referential field is an error because the substitution cannot be resolved:

foo : ${foo} // an error

When foo : ${foo} is merged with an earlier value for foo, however, the substitution can be resolved to that earlier value. When merging two objects, the self-reference in the overriding field refers to the overridden field. Say you have:

foo : { a : 1 }

and then:

foo : ${foo}

Then ${foo} resolves to { a : 1 }, the value of the overridden field.

It would be an error if these two fields were reversed, so first:

foo : ${foo}

and then second:

foo : { a : 1 }

Here the ${foo} self-reference comes before foo has a value, so it is undefined, exactly as if the substitution referenced a path not found in the document.

Because foo : ${foo} conceptually looks to previous definitions of foo for a value, the error should be treated as "undefined" rather than "intractable cycle"; as a result, the optional substitution syntax ${?foo} does not create a cycle:

foo : ${?foo} // this field just disappears silently

If a substitution is hidden by a value that could not be merged with it (by a non-object value) then it is never evaluated and no error will be reported. So for example:

foo : ${does-not-exist}
foo : 42

In this case, no matter what ${does-not-exist} resolves to, we know foo is 42, so ${does-not-exist} is never evaluated and there is no error. The same is true for cycles like foo : ${foo}, foo : 42, where the initial self-reference must simply be ignored.

A self-reference resolves to the value "below" even if it's part of a path expression. So for example:

foo : { a : { c : 1 } }
foo : ${foo.a}
foo : { a : 2 }

Here, ${foo.a} would refer to { c : 1 } rather than 2 and so the final merge would be { a : 2, c : 1 }.

Recall that for a field to be self-referential, it must have a substitution or value concatenation as its value. If a field has an object or array value, for example, then it is not self-referential even if there is a reference to the field itself inside that object or array.

Implementations must be careful to allow objects to refer to paths within themselves, for example:

bar : { foo : 42,
        baz : ${bar.foo}
      }

Here, if an implementation resolved all substitutions in bar as part of resolving the substitution ${bar.foo}, there would be a cycle. The implementation must only resolve the foo field in bar, rather than recursing the entire bar object.

Because there is no inherent cycle here, the substitution must "look forward" (including looking at the field currently being defined). To make this clearer, bar.baz would be 43 in:

bar : { foo : 42,
        baz : ${bar.foo}
      }
bar : { foo : 43 }

Mutually-referring objects should also work, and are not self-referential (so they look forward):

// bar.a should end up as 4
bar : { a : ${foo.d}, b : 1 }
bar.b = 3
// foo.c should end up as 3
foo : { c : ${bar.b}, d : 2 }
foo.d = 4

Another tricky case is an optional self-reference in a value concatenation, in this example a should be foo not foofoo because the self reference has to "look back" to an undefined a:

a = ${?a}foo

In general, in resolving a substitution the implementation must:

lazy-evaluate the substitution target so there's no "circularity by side effect"
"look forward" and use the final value for the path specified in the substitution
if a cycle results, the implementation must "look back" in the merge stack to try to resolve the cycle
if neither lazy evaluation nor "looking only backward" resolves a cycle, the substitution is missing which is an error unless the ${?foo} optional-substitution syntax was used.

For example, this is not possible to resolve:

bar : ${foo}
foo : ${bar}

A multi-step loop like this should also be detected as invalid:

a : ${b}
b : ${c}
c : ${a}

Some cases have undefined behavior because the behavior depends on the order in which two fields are resolved, and that order is not defined. For example:

a : 1
b : 2
a : ${b}
b : ${a}

Implementations are allowed to handle this by setting both a and b to 1, setting both to 2, or generating an error. Ideally this situation would generate an error, but that may be difficult to implement. Making the behavior defined would require always working with ordered maps rather than unordered maps, which is too constraining. Implementations only have to track order for duplicate instances of the same field (i.e. merges).

Implementations must set both a and b to the same value in this case, however. In practice this means that all substitutions must be memoized (resolved once, with the result retained). Memoization should be keyed by the substitution "instance" (the specific occurrence of the ${} expression) rather than by the path inside the ${} expression, because substitutions may be resolved differently depending on their position in the file.

Includes¶

Include syntax¶

An include statement consists of the unquoted string include followed by whitespace and then either:

a single quoted string which is interpreted heuristically as URL, filename, or classpath resource.
url(), file(), or classpath() surrounding a quoted string which is then interpreted as a URL, file, or classpath. The string must be quoted, unlike in CSS.
required() surrounding one of the above

An include statement can appear in place of an object field.

If the unquoted string include appears at the start of a path expression where an object key would be expected, then it is not interpreted as a path expression or a key.

Instead, the next value must be a quoted string or a quoted string surrounded by url(), file(), or classpath(). This value is the resource name.

Together, the unquoted include and the resource name substitute for an object field syntactically, and are separated from the following object fields or includes by the usual comma (and as usual the comma may be omitted if there's a newline).

If an unquoted include at the start of a key is followed by anything other than a single quoted string or the url("")/file("")/classpath("") syntax, it is invalid and an error should be generated.

There can be any amount of whitespace, including newlines, between the unquoted include and the resource name. For url() etc., whitespace is allowed inside the parentheses () (outside of the quotes).

Value concatenation is NOT performed on the "argument" to include or url() etc. The argument must be a single quoted string. No substitutions are allowed, and the argument may not be an unquoted string or any other kind of value.

Unquoted include has no special meaning if it is not the start of a key's path expression.

It may appear later in the key:

# this is valid
{ foo include : 42 }
# equivalent to
{ "foo include" : 42 }

It may appear as an object or array value:

{ foo : include } # value is the string "include"
[ include ]       # array of one string "include"

You can quote "include" if you want a key that starts with the word "include", only unquoted include is special:

{ "include" : 42 }

Include semantics: merging¶

An including file contains the include statement and an included file is the one specified in the include statement. (They need not be regular files on a filesystem, but assume they are for the moment.)

An included file must contain an object, not an array. This is significant because both JSON and HOCON allow arrays as root values in a document.

If an included file contains an array as the root value, it is invalid and an error should be generated.

The included file should be parsed, producing a root object. The keys from the root object are conceptually substituted for the include statement in the including file.

If a key in the included object occurred prior to the include statement in the including object, the included key's value overrides or merges with the earlier value, exactly as with duplicate keys found in a single file.
If the including file repeats a key from an earlier-included object, the including file's value would override or merge with the one from the included file.

Include semantics: substitution¶

Substitutions in included files are looked up at two different paths; first, relative to the root of the included file; second, relative to the root of the including configuration.

Recall that substitution happens as a final step, after parsing. It should be done for the entire app's configuration, not for single files in isolation.

Therefore, if an included file contains substitutions, they must be "fixed up" to be relative to the app's configuration root.

Say for example that the root configuration is this:

{ a : { include "foo.conf" } }

And "foo.conf" might look like this:

{ x : 10, y : ${x} }

If you parsed "foo.conf" in isolation, then ${x} would evaluate to 10, the value at the path x. If you include "foo.conf" in an object at key a, however, then it must be fixed up to be ${a.x} rather than ${x}.

Say that the root configuration redefines a.x, like this:

{
    a : { include "foo.conf" }
    a : { x : 42 }
}

Then the ${x} in "foo.conf", which has been fixed up to ${a.x}, would evaluate to 42 rather than to 10. Substitution happens after parsing the whole configuration.

However, there are plenty of cases where the included file might intend to refer to the application's root config. For example, to get a value from a system property or from the reference configuration. So it's not enough to only look up the "fixed up" path, it's necessary to look up the original path as well.

Include semantics: missing files and required files¶

By default, if an included file does not exist then the include statement should be silently ignored (as if the included file contained only an empty object).

If however an included resource is mandatory then the name of the included resource may be wrapped with required(), in which case file parsing will fail with an error if the resource cannot be resolved.

The syntax for this is

include required("foo.conf")
include required(file("foo.conf"))
include required(classpath("foo.conf"))
include required(url("http://localhost/foo.conf"))

Other IO errors probably should not be ignored but implementations will have to make a judgment which IO errors reflect an ignorable missing file, and which reflect a problem to bring to the user's attention.

Include semantics: file formats and extensions¶

Implementations may support including files in other formats. Those formats must be compatible with the JSON type system, or have some documented mapping to JSON's type system.

If an implementation supports multiple formats, then the extension may be omitted from the name of included files:

include "foo"

If a filename has no extension, the implementation should treat it as a basename and try loading the file with all known extensions.

If the file exists with multiple extensions, they should all be loaded and merged together.

Files in HOCON format should be parsed last. Files in JSON format should be parsed next-to-last.

In short, include "foo" might be equivalent to:

include "foo.properties"
include "foo.json"
include "foo.conf"

This same extension-based behavior is applied to classpath resources and files.

For URLs, a basename without extension is not allowed; only the exact URL specified is used. The format will be chosen based on the Content-Type if available, or by the extension of the path component of the URL if no Content-Type is set. This is true even for file: URLs.

Include semantics: locating resources¶

A quoted string not surrounded by url(), file(), classpath() must be interpreted heuristically. The heuristic is to treat the quoted string as:

a URL, if the quoted string is a valid URL with a known protocol.
otherwise, a file or other resource "adjacent to" the one being parsed and of the same type as the one being parsed. The meaning of "adjacent to", and the string itself, has to be specified separately for each kind of resource.
On the Java Virtual Machine, if an include statement does not identify a valid URL or an existing resource "adjacent to" the including resource, implementations may wish to fall back to a classpath resource. This allows configurations found in files or URLs to access classpath resources in a natural way.

Implementations may vary in the kinds of resources they can include.

For resources located on the Java classpath:

included resources are looked up by calling getResource() on the same class loader used to look up the including resource.
if the included resource name is absolute (starts with '/') then it should be passed to getResource() with the '/' removed.
if the included resource name does not start with '/' then it should have the "directory" of the including resource prepended to it, before passing it to getResource(). If the including resource is not absolute (no '/') and has no "parent directory" (is just a single path element), then the included relative resource name should be left as-is.
it would be wrong to use getResource() to get a URL and then locate the included name relative to that URL, because a class loader is not required to have a one-to-one mapping between paths in its URLs and the paths it handles in getResource(). In other words, the "adjacent to" computation should be done on the resource name not on the resource's URL.

For plain files on the filesystem:

if the included file is an absolute path then it should be kept absolute and loaded as such.
if the included file is a relative path, then it should be located relative to the directory containing the including file. The current working directory of the process parsing a file must NOT be used when interpreting included paths.
if the file is not found, fall back to the classpath resource. The classpath resource should not have any package name added in front, it should be relative to the "root"; which means any leading "/" should just be removed (absolute is the same as relative since it's root-relative). The "/" is handled for consistency with including resources from inside other classpath resources, where the resource name may not be root-relative and "/" allows specifying relative to root.

URLs:

for files loaded from a URL, "adjacent to" should be based on parsing the URL's path component, replacing the last path element with the included name.
file: URLs should behave in exactly the same way as a plain filename

Implementations need not support files, Java resources, or URLs; and they need not support particular URL protocols. However, if they do support them they should do so as described above.

Note that at present, if url()/file()/classpath() are specified, the included items are NOT interpreted relative to the including items. Relative-to-including-file paths only work with the heuristic include "foo.conf". This may change in the future.

Conversion of numerically-indexed objects to arrays¶

In some file formats and contexts, such as Java properties files, there isn't a good way to define arrays. To provide some mechanism for this, implementations should support converting objects with numeric keys into arrays. For example, this object:

{ "0" : "a", "1" : "b" }

could be treated as:

[ "a", "b" ]

This allows creating an array in a properties file like this:

foo.0 = "a"
foo.1 = "b"

The details:

the conversion should be done lazily when required to avoid a type error, NOT eagerly anytime an object has numeric keys.
the conversion should be done when you would do an automatic type conversion (see the section "Automatic type conversions" below).
the conversion should be done in a concatenation when a list is expected and an object with numeric keys is found.
the conversion should not occur if the object is empty or has no keys which parse as positive integers.
the conversion should ignore any keys which do not parse as positive integers.
the conversion should sort by the integer value of each key and then build the array; if the integer keys are "0" and "2" then the resulting array would have indices "0" and "1", i.e. missing indices in the object are eliminated.

HOCON specification¶

Conveyor extensions¶

Goals / Background¶

Definitions¶

Unchanged from JSON¶

Comments¶

Omit root braces¶

Key-value separator¶

Commas¶

Whitespace¶

Duplicate keys and object merging¶

Unquoted strings¶

Multi-line strings¶

Value concatenation¶

String value concatenation¶

Array and object concatenation¶

Arrays without commas or newlines¶

Path expressions¶

Paths as keys¶

Substitutions¶

Self-Referential Substitutions¶

The += field separator¶

Examples of Self-Referential Substitutions¶

Includes¶

Include syntax¶

Include semantics: merging¶

Include semantics: substitution¶

Include semantics: missing files and required files¶

Include semantics: file formats and extensions¶

Include semantics: locating resources¶

Conversion of numerically-indexed objects to arrays¶

The `+=` field separator¶