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Data-Type Reference

Laurence MorganAbout 1 mintypes

Data-Type Reference

This section is a glossary of data-types which Murex is natively aware.

Most of the time you will not need to worry about typing in Murex as the shell is designed around productivity as opposed to strictness despite generally following a strictly typed design.

Read the Language Tour for more detail on this topic.

Definitions

For clarity, it is worth explaining a couple of terms:

  1. "Data-types" in Murex are a description of the format of data. This means that while any stdio stream in UNIX will by "bytes", Murex might label that data as being a JSON string or CSV file (for example) which means any builtins that parse that stdio stream, for example to return the first 8 items, would need to parse those types differently. Thus a "data-type" in Murex is actually more than just a description of a data structure; it is a series of APIs to marshall and unmarshall data from complex file formats. This enables you to use the same command line tools to query any type of output.

  2. "Primitive" data-types refer to types that are the required by Murex to function. These will be int, float / number, bool, string, generic, and null.

Feature Sets

Since not all data formats are equal (for example the TOML file format doesn't support naked arrays where as JSON does), you may find some features missing in some data-types which are present in others. If in doubt then refer to the manual here or check the API manual for more details about specific hooks.

Pages

  • * (generic): generic (primitive)
  • bool: Boolean (primitive)
  • commonlog: Apache httpd "common" log format
  • csv: CSV files (and other character delimited tables)
  • float (floating point number): Floating point number (primitive)
  • hcl: HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)
  • int: Whole number (primitive)
  • json: JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
  • jsonc: Concatenated JSON
  • jsonl: JSON Lines
  • num (number): Floating point number (primitive)
  • path: Structured object for working with file and directory paths
  • paths: Structured array for working with $PATH style data
  • str (string): string (primitive)
  • toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (TOML)
  • yaml: YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML)
  • mxjson: Murex-flavoured JSON (deprecated)