datatxt

Datatxt is a lightweight, human-readable data serialization format used for storing and exchanging data in plain text. Although there is no single official specification, the term appears in various open-source projects and configuration systems as a simple alternative to JSON or YAML. Datatxt is generally designed to be easy for people to edit by hand and reasonably straightforward for software to parse.

Core design goals include readability, minimal syntax, and diff-friendly editing. A datatxt document consists of lines containing a key and a value separated by a colon. Indentation expresses nesting for compound structures, such as objects or maps. Lists are commonly represented by lines beginning with a dash or by repeated key blocks. Comments are often allowed, typically starting with a hash or semicolon. Values can be numbers, booleans, strings, or null, with strings optionally quoted when they include special characters.

Usage and interoperability: datatxt is used for configuration files, metadata descriptors, and lightweight data dumps in environments where a plain-text format is preferred. While several implementations exist across programming languages, there is no single universal parser. Compared with JSON and YAML, datatxt emphasizes simplicity and editability at the potential cost of less rigid schemas and broader tooling support. See also: JSON, YAML, TOML.