lector reads Ruby data from strings or files without necessarily evaluating either.

Oh yeah, and the build status? We have one of those:

> require 'lector'
 => true
> Lector::read_s("{x: 11, :pants? => false}")
 => {:x=>11, :pants?=>false} 

# read-eval is off by default:
> Lector::read_s("{three: #='1+2'}")
RuntimeError: Evaluation isn't allowed if :read_eval is false

# but when you turn it on...
> Lector::read_s("{three: #='1+2'}", :read_eval => true)
 => {:three=>3} 

Please see the tests for more usage examples.

Ruby's literal support for hashes, arrays, keywords, numbers, and strings makes Ruby data slightly more expressive than JSON and arguably as expressive as YAML.

Ruby could be a decent format for representing things like markup or configuration data. This library allows you to digest Ruby data strings and files without having to worry if arbitrary code will execute.

This library started as a fork of Michael Fogus and Alex Redington's clj.rb, a library for parsing Clojure data from Ruby. A big thanks to them for getting this party started.