Easy file metadata.

Store metadata in a special YAML configuration header for text files, or a sidecar "shadow" configuration file for binary files.

Caput: n. Latin for "head" or "top". Root of many English words, such as "captain", "capital", and "decapitate".

Caput is available from PyPI:

pip install caput

Say that you're building a static site generator. You can add a metadata header to any textfile. The first three bytes must be ---\n. In index.md:

---
title: My Site
author: Me
featured_image: /images/my-header.jpg
---
# Welcome to my site!

Read the metadata header:

>>> import caput

>>> caput.read_config('./index.md', defaults={'markup': 'markdown'})
{'markup': 'markdown',
 'title': 'My Site',
 'author': 'Me',
 'featured_image': '/images/my-header.jpg'}

Read the file contents:

>>> caput.read_contents('./index.md')
'# Welcome to my site!\n'

You can add metadata to binary files with a "shadow" header. For your featured image, add a .yml file with the same base name, e.g. for ./images/my-header.jpg you would add ./images/my-header.yml:

title: My Site Header
credit: Me

Read the metadata header:

>>> caput.read_config('./images/my-header.jpg')
{'title': 'My Site Header', 'credit': 'Me')

Read the file contents:

>>> caput.read_contents('./images/my-header.jpg', encoding=None)
b'...binary data...'