When you're writing a program in C, C++, Objective C, maybe D?. You come to a point, how do I load my data? If you're making a game it would be nice to save your level data in some sort of file. And you should! You could use XML. It is widely used so why not? Well...did you ever opened the libXML library from xmlsoft.org? The 'parser.c' alone is already 395Kb! Sure, they need to make the code to follow the W3C standard, but come on! 395Kb for a parser?

That's one of the many reasons I wrote Lasanja. The other one is that I like to write my own code. Another is that XML has it flaws like '<a><b></a></b>' is not a valid structure, which in Lasanja you can't. The last and importent reason. I like things to be simple, don't overdo things you will never use.

So, what's Lasanja? Lasanja is a markup language, just like XML. Let say we want to load a level file. We could define a Lasanja file like so:

 
version{ 1 }
 
level{
	width{ 30 }
	height{ 5 }
 
	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
 
	enemy{
		x{ 12.12 }
		y{ 24.24 }
	}
 
	enemy{
		x{ 56.34 }
		y{ 23.95 }
	}
}

 
<data>
	<version>
	    1
	</version>
 
	<level>
		<width>30</width>
		<height>5</height>
 
		1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
		1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
		1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
		1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
		1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
 
		<enemy>
			<x>12.12</x>
			<y>24.24</y>
		</enemy>
 
		<enemy>
			<x>56.34</x>
			<y>23.95</y>
		</enemy>
	</level>
</data>

You can see that's almost the same. In Lasanja there are two things, nodes and data. In XML you got, nodes, data and attributes. I removed the attributes because for some that's confusing and I don't like people confused. Also note the extra '<data>' tag in the xml file. That is not needed in a Lasanja file.

In short. With tagname{ you create a new node named 'tagname'. With } you close the node. Everyting between { and } is data. That's it! You find more info in the project file.

You may use the code anyway you like. If you vind some bugs, please e-mail me. I would appreciate it.
The project file and sources are here: http://vin.ingine.nl/posts/13/lasanja.v0.4.zip

Lasanja v0.4 does not mean it's not finished or buggy code. It does what it does and it does well. I don't consider this as a beta release. Because this is it's first release I don't want to release it as v1.0 yet.

Did I mentioned that the project executable for reading an example level las file, is only 9Kb! You can store that 163 times on a 1.44 Mb floppy disk :P