NEON is very similar to YAML.The main difference is that the NEON supports "entities" (so can be used e.g. to parse phpDoc annotations) and tab characters for indentation. NEON syntax is a little simpler and the parsing is faster.

Example of Neon code:

# my web application config

php:
	date.timezone: Europe/Prague
	zlib.output_compression: yes  # use gzip

database:
	driver: mysql
	username: root
	password: beruska92

users:
	- Dave
	- Kryten
	- Rimmer

npm install neon-js

CLI executable is not available yet.

You can create browser compatible library using browserify.

npm install browserify
browserify -r neon-js -s neon

You can found precompiled browserifed version in repository matej21/neon-js-dist.

<script src="dist/neon.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var data = neon.decode("hello: world")
</script>

var neon = require('neon-js');

try {
	var result = neon.decode("foo: {bar: 123}")
} catch (e) {
	if (e instanceof neon.Error) {
		console.log(e.message);
	}
	throw e;
}

Decodes input NEON string.

var result = neon.decode(input);

Encodes javascript to NEON.

var data = {foo: "bar"}
var result = neon.encode(data);
//or you can use block mode
var result = neon.encode(data, neon.BLOCK);

Class representing NEON entity.

var entity = neon.decode("Foo(bar)");
entity.value; "Foo";
entity.attributes// neon.Map instance, see bellow

NEON was originally written for PHP where all NEON array-like structures (lists, objects or mixed) were converted to the PHP array. And arrays in PHP are very powerful - they can be treated as a list, hash table and more. neon.Map is trying to keep the very basic of this behaviour - items are ordered (list) and can have string key (hash table). Therefore all NEON array-like structures are mapped to the neon.Map.

#example neon
foo: bar
- lorem
ipsum: dolor
- sit

var map = neon.decode(input);
//map instanceof neon.Map

Returns value by the key.

map.get("foo"); // bar
map.get(0); // lorem
map.get("xxx"); //throws an Error

Checks if the given key exists in the map.

map.has("foo"); // true
map.has("xxx"); // false

Calls provided function for every item in the map. Key is passed as a first argument, value as a second argument.

map.forEach(function (key, value) {

});

Checks if Map is a list. That means the map doesn't contain any string keys and numeric keys are in range 0..(length-1).

map.isList(); //false

Returns values as an array.

var values = map.values();
// ["bar", "lorem", "dolor", "sit"]

Returns keys as an array.

var keys = map.keys();
// ["foo", 0, "ipsum", 1]

Returns items structure. This structure is an array where every item is object with properties key and value.

var items = map.items();

// [{key: "foo", value: "bar"}, ...]

Converts Map to javascript object. Items order may be lost.

var obj = map.toObject();
// {foo: "bar", 0: "lorem", ipsum: "dolor", 1: sit}

Dumps decoded structure into simple text output as you can see in the demo.

var text = neon.Dumper.toText(data)`;

• Official Neon homepage
• Neon-js sandbox
• Neon for PHP
• Neon-js for browser