Programming

It's not really a standalone file format, it's executable Lua code.

It returns a new item with the given table contents.

That syntax with the keys in square brackets is the "long-form" method of creating a new table, that's allows the use of spaces and dashes in the key name.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34687498/what-is-the-function-of-square-brackets-around-table-keys-in-lua

Maybe this is the lua-equivelent of a python Pickle file?

WTFON

I think it's just normal Lua code.

Here's a quick json converter (based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/55575074), assuming you have lua installed:

local function to_json(obj)
    local result = {}
    for key, value in pairs(obj) do
        if type(value) == "string" then
            value = string.format("\"%s\"", value)
        elseif type(value) == "table" then
            value = to_json(value)
        end
        table.insert(result, string.format("\"%s\":%s", key, value))
    end
    return "{" .. table.concat(result, ",") .. "}"
end

function item(obj)
    print(to_json(obj))
end

dofile(arg[1])

It just defines the item function to print json, and executes the data file.

arg[1], the first command line argument, is the path to the data file:

$  lua to_json.lua path/to/datafile.list

and pipe the output to something.json or whatever else you want to do.

Almost looks like mongodb output. What's the file extension?

WTH is this shit? @postwatchbot@lemy.lol

Looks like somebody rewrote json to require brackets around keys and to require semicolons? Very likely custom.