NEON: Nette Object Notation

Introduction

NEON is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files, but could be used in many applications where data is being stored

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.

Documentation can be found on the website.

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NEON language

Try NEON in sandbox!

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

Installation

The recommended way to install is via Composer:

composer require nette/neon

It requires PHP version 7.1 and supports PHP up to 7.3.

Usage

Nette\Neon\Neon is a static class for encoding and decoding NEON files.

Neon::encode() returns $value encoded into NEON. Flags accepts Neon::BLOCK which formats NEON in multiline format.

use Nette\Neon\Neon;
$neon = Neon::encode($value); // Returns $value encoded in NEON
$neon = Neon::encode($value, Neon::BLOCK); // Returns formatted $value encoded in NEON

Neon::decode() converts given NEON to PHP value:

$value = Neon::decode('hello: world'); // Returns an array ['hello' => 'world']

Both methods throw Nette\Neon\Exception on error.

Editors plugins

NetBeans IDE has built-in support
PhpStorm
Visual Studio Code
Emacs