Properties Ada is a lightweight simplistic Ada library for parsing .properties files. It follows the Wikipedia proposal at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.properties

Properties Ada currently supports most of .properties features such as

• # and ! line comments
• =, : and space delimiters
• Multiline values ending with \ and escaped \ characters (\\)
• \n, \r and \t values
• Empty values

However, it does not support escaped unicode characters in the form of\u0000.

To install Properties-Ada, use the following commands:

gprbuild -p properties_ada.gpr
gprinstall -p -f properties_ada.gpr

If you want to run the unit tests, run the following commands:

gprbuild -p test/properties_ada_test.gpr
bin/test_runner

The following code snippet describe how to load a .properties file and extract its data. Note that Properties.Map_Type is actually an Ada.Containers.Hashed_Maps that maps Unbounded_String to Unbounded_String underneath. Therefore you may interact with the map without using the provided Get and Set. Those are helper methods meant to make the usage of the library with String easier. If you want to retrieve the amount of entries in the map or iterate through the keys however, you will have to use functionalities of Ada.Containers.Hashed_Maps.

with Ada.Text_IO;
with Properties;

procedure Main is
    Map : Properties.Map_Type;
begin
    Map := Properties.Load("your_file.properties");
    
    Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("key1 = """ & Properties.Get(Map, "key1") & """");
    Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("key2 = """ & Properties.Get(Map, "key2") & """");
end Main;

The following code snippet describes how to populate a map and write it into a .properties file.

with Properties;

procedure Main is
    Map : Properties.Map_Type;
begin
    Properties.Set(Map, "key", "value");
    Properties.Set(Map, "hello", "world");
    Properties.Set(Map, "escaped=characters", "are:fully\supported");

    Properties.Save(Map, "saved.properties");
end Main;

This Ada library is offered by LatenceTech, a Montreal based startup specialized in low-latency optimization. Our website is https://latencetech.com/