The Starscope database format has gone through a couple of iterations over the last year, but the current one is pretty nice and I don't see it changing again in the near future. We magically read old formats and convert them, so we only document the current version here.
The basic format of the database is gzipped text. Gzip is a common compression algorithm; most languages include support for it by default, and it is readable on effectively every platform. Underneath the compression, the file has three lines:
- version number
- metadata
- databases
This is just the ASCII character '5'. If the format changes significantly, it will be incremented, but that is unlikely.
This is a JSON object. Keys include:
:paths- the paths containing the files to scan:excludes- the paths and patterns to exclude from scanning:files- the files previously scanned (including things like last-modified time):version- The Starscope version which wrote the database (not the same as the database format version).
This is also a JSON object. The keys are
table names, and the values are the tables themselves. Each table is an array of
records, and each record is itself a JSON object. The only keys that are
guaranteed to exist in every record are :file (the name of the file the record
is from) and :name (an array containing the individual components of the
fully-scoped name).