VDF4R

Parse Valve Data Format files easily and quickly.

Valve has its own data format for storing game information. This library lets you parse these files into a plain-old Ruby hash easily and quickly.

After that, you can do with the data what you will.

As normal:

gem install vdf4r

Or in your Gemfile:

gem 'vdf4r'

require 'vdf4r'
require 'pp'

File.open('vdf_file.txt') do |file|
  parser = VDF4R::Parser.new(file)
  pp parser.parse # pretty-printed
end

This library has only really been used on a few Dota 2 VDF files. It's not battle-tested yet, and there are probably some minor issues.

If you find something you'd like to discuss, you can find me on #dota2replay on quakenet IRC.

At least one of Dota 2's own VDF files have grammar mistakes. (i.e. npc_abilities.txt) If you get an "ungrammatical content" error while parsing, you will need to fix the error. It will give you the offending line:

(RuntimeError)parser.rb:30:in `block in parse': ungrammatical content: '        / Damage.
'

Indeed, in the VDF file, there are "comment" lines lacking the proper '//' prefix. When I changed the file to contain '// Damage.' it parsed correctly.

Another thing you'll see, specifically in dota_english.txt is the placement of two key/value pairs on one line. This will have to be fixed manually, since it's an outright error:

"DOTA_Tooltip_ability_item_mjollnir_static_duration"          "STATIC DURATION:"    "DOTA_Tooltip_ability_item_mjollnir_static_damage"            "STATIC DAMAGE:"

This can be fixed like so if you encounter similar errors:

"DOTA_Tooltip_ability_item_mjollnir_static_duration"          "STATIC DURATION:"
"DOTA_Tooltip_ability_item_mjollnir_static_damage"            "STATIC DAMAGE:"

I'll try to make the parser more permissive as time allows.

Just clone the source from here. If issuing a pull request, make sure your change is on a topic branch accompanied by new tests; all behaviors must pass.

VDF4R is offered under the MIT license. See LICENSE for the license itself.