write a special line as the first line in any log file so that the file can be
automatically parsed by a tool
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Key: LBCORE-234
URL: http://jira.qos.ch/browse/LBCORE-234
Project: logback-core
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: Layout
Affects Versions: 0.9.9
Reporter: James Strachan
Assignee: Logback dev list
So there's a few tools out there for parsing log files; most of them require
the user to create a regex or find the right line of some config file to figure
out what the Pattern layout expression was used to create the log file. The
problem with these is the regex/patterns are quite brittle; its easy for
code/dependencies to change and new log configuration to become effective or
for users to not know the correct config/pattern for a file. (Its easy to have
quite a few log configuration files in a tarball/war/bundle and not be quite
sure which one is really active in a container for example).
A simpler idea would be to (optionally but hopefully by default) output the
first line of every log file some kind of well known first line (which can
easily be excluded by tools that grep for stuff or whatever) which describes
the pattern layout thats being used to write the file - so files generated by
logback would be automatically parseable by a generic tool. Indeed it'd be nice
to have such a tool; so you can easily load a file and turn it into
ILoggingEvent objects by parsing the first line...
e.g. imaging if all the files (including rolling logs and whatnot) looked like
this...
{code}
#logback.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} | %-5.5p | %-16.16t | %-32.32c{1} |
%-32.32C %4L | %X{bundle.id} - %X{bundle.name} - %X{bundle.version} | %m%n
11:52:08,267 | INFO | FelixStartLevel | BlueprintExtender |
rint.container.BlueprintExtender 124 | 9 - org.apache.aries.blueprint - 0.3.1
| No quiesce support is available, so blueprint components will not participate
in quiesce operations
11:52:08,400 | INFO | rint Extender: 2 | BlueprintContainerImpl |
container.BlueprintContainerImpl 266 | 9 - org.apache.aries.blueprint - 0.3.1
| Bundle org.apache.karaf.management is waiting for namespace handlers
11:52:08,704 | INFO | FelixStartLevel | jmx | ?
? | 27 - org.apache.aries.jmx - 0.3.0 |
Starting JMX OSGi agent
{code}
so via a simple bit of code the first line (or all lines starting with
#logback.) could be parsed to figure out the format of the file; then the rest
of the file could be turned into ILogEvents and passed into tools - or rendered
easily in the logback eclipse plugin for example.
Folks could even reverse engineer log formats and make sure other
framework/tools/apps output the correct log format up front.
Then dev/ops can just 'open a log' and its not just text with error prone
regex/parsing expressions that have to be guessed but a kinda 'self describing
log markup'
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