This article needs additional citations for
verification. (December 2009) |
A nameâvalue pair, also called an attributeâvalue pair, keyâvalue pair, or fieldâvalue pair, is a fundamental
data representation in
computing systems and
applications. Designers often desire an open-ended
data structure that allows for
future extension without modifying existing code or data. In such situations, all or part of the
data model may be expressed as a collection of
2-tuples in the form <attribute name, value>
with each element being an attributeâvalue pair. Depending on the particular application and the implementation chosen by programmers, attribute names may or may not be unique.
Some of the applications where information is represented as name-value pairs are:
Some computer languages implement nameâvalue pairs, or more frequently collections of attributeâvalue pairs, as standard language features. Most of these implement the general model of an associative array: an unordered list of unique attributes with associated values. As a result, they are not fully general; they cannot be used, for example, to implement electronic mail headers (which are ordered and non-unique).
In some applications, a nameâvalue pair has a value that contains a nested collection of attributeâvalue pairs. Some data serialization formats such as JSON support arbitrarily deep nesting. [2] Other data representations are restricted to one level of nesting, such as INI file's section/name/value.
This article needs additional citations for
verification. (December 2009) |
A nameâvalue pair, also called an attributeâvalue pair, keyâvalue pair, or fieldâvalue pair, is a fundamental
data representation in
computing systems and
applications. Designers often desire an open-ended
data structure that allows for
future extension without modifying existing code or data. In such situations, all or part of the
data model may be expressed as a collection of
2-tuples in the form <attribute name, value>
with each element being an attributeâvalue pair. Depending on the particular application and the implementation chosen by programmers, attribute names may or may not be unique.
Some of the applications where information is represented as name-value pairs are:
Some computer languages implement nameâvalue pairs, or more frequently collections of attributeâvalue pairs, as standard language features. Most of these implement the general model of an associative array: an unordered list of unique attributes with associated values. As a result, they are not fully general; they cannot be used, for example, to implement electronic mail headers (which are ordered and non-unique).
In some applications, a nameâvalue pair has a value that contains a nested collection of attributeâvalue pairs. Some data serialization formats such as JSON support arbitrarily deep nesting. [2] Other data representations are restricted to one level of nesting, such as INI file's section/name/value.