GNU Recutils is a set of tools and libraries to access human-editable, plain text databases called recfiles. The data is stored as a sequence of records, each record containing an arbitrary number of named fields
https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/
#blastFromThePast (/via @gumnos)
I'm amused that, while I use the *format* and edit it in my $EDITOR, I almost never use the actual recutils recsel(1) for querying because it's quicker to just use the search functionality in my editor to find the records of interest, compared to remembering the recsel query syntax.
About all I use is recfix(1) to sanity-check…it occasionally catches duplicate IDs, broken foreign-key references (such as my address-book having familial links like "father: johnsmith"), or malformed field-values.
The last time I poked at the code (it's been a couple years), it was 8-bit clean, so you could use whatever 8-bit encoding you wanted (acknowledging that it might struggle with UTF16 or UTF32 and their LE/BE variants) as long as you were consistent. So I've had no trouble with the handful of UTF8 characters I've used in my address-book.
That "Choose Your Own Adventure" one was a hoot.
JP Mens
Tim Chase
diesch
ThierryStoehr