rdfless

A colorful pretty printer for RDF data with ANSI colors.

Description

rdfless is a command-line tool that reads RDF data in various formats (Turtle, TriG, N-Triples, N-Quads) and pretty-prints it with syntax highlighting. It's designed to make RDF data more readable in terminal environments.

Key features:

• Colorized output for different RDF components (subjects, predicates, objects, literals)
• Support for reading from files or stdin (piped input)
• Option to expand prefixes or display PREFIX declarations
• Customizable colors through a configuration file

Supported Formats

• Turtle / Turtle-*
• TriG / TriG-*
• N-Triples (NT)
• N-Quads (NQ)

Installation

Debian/Ubuntu from PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:larsw/rdfless
sudo apt update
sudo apt install rdfless

Using Cargo

cargo install rdfless

From Source

git clone https://github.com/larsw/rdfless.git
cd rdfless
cargo build --release

The binary will be available at target/release/rdfless.

Build Optimizations

Release builds automatically include the following optimizations:

• Debug symbols are stripped from the binary to reduce file size
• If UPX is available on your system path, the binary will be compressed for even smaller file size

These optimizations help create a more compact executable without affecting functionality.

Usage

# Process a TTL file
rdfless file.ttl

# Process a TriG file
rdfless file.trig

# Process an N-Triples file
rdfless file.nt

# Process an N-Quads file
rdfless file.nq

# Process multiple files
rdfless file1.ttl file2.trig file3.nt file4.nq

# Read from stdin
cat file.ttl | rdfless

# Expand prefixes instead of showing PREFIX declarations
rdfless --expand file.ttl

# Override the input format (auto-detected from file extension by default)
rdfless --format turtle file.rdf
rdfless --format trig file.rdf
rdfless --format ntriples file.rdf
rdfless --format nquads file.rdf

Configuration

rdfless uses a TOML configuration file to customize colors. The configuration file is located at:

~/.local/rdfless/config.toml

If the file doesn't exist, a default configuration will be created automatically.

Example configuration:

[colors]
subject = "blue"
predicate = "green"
object = "white"
literal = "red"
prefix = "yellow"
base = "yellow"
graph = "yellow"

[output]
expand = false

Available colors:

• Named colors: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white
• Bright named colors: bright_black, bright_red, bright_green, bright_yellow, bright_blue, bright_magenta, bright_cyan, bright_white
• CSS color codes: Any valid hex color code in the format #RRGGBB or #RGB (e.g., #336699 or #369)

Example configuration with CSS color codes:

[colors]
subject = "#336699"
predicate = "#00cc00"
object = "#ffffff"
literal = "#ff0000"
prefix = "#ffcc00"
base = "#ffcc00"
graph = "#ffcc00"

[output]
expand = false

Example

Input:

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix ex: <https://example.org/> .

ex:Person a rdfs:Class ;
    rdfs:label "Person" .

ex:john a ex:Person ;
    rdfs:label "John Doe" .

Output will be the same content but with syntax highlighting for better readability.

Screenshots

Turtle Format (TTL)

Compact Mode	Expanded Mode

TriG Format (TRIG)

Compact Mode	Expanded Mode

License

This project is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Lars Wilhelmsen lars@lars-backwards.org