VBoxManage showvminfo --machinereadable XXX has inconsistent output format

[gsp]

The output of VBoxManage showvminfo --machinereadable is not as easy to parse as it should.

To reproduce:

VBoxManage showvminfo --machinereadable SomeVM | less

some of the values which are integers show with quotas, some not:

cpus=4
sockSnd="64"

most of the keywords show without quotas, some with:

VMStateChangeTime="2013-09-04T08:07:24.020000000"
"IDE-Controller-1-1"="none"

some items are merged in a strange way:

Time offset=0rtcuseutc="off"

Boolean values should show without quotas to distinct them from strings:

lpt2="off"

Quotas and newlines in user-editable text should be replaced by the proper escape-sequences:

description="Multiline Description
with "quotas""

Keywords should be language-neutral (don't localize):

"Disketten-Controller-0-1"="none"

Please consider to make the output valid JSON, this is much easier to parse (​http://www.json.org)

[Frank Mehnert]

Many valid points. The "merged in a strange way" is mentioned in #13176 and will be fixed in the next maintenance release.

[Nick Hibma]

The problem with strings is present in descriptions ("description" and 'SnapshotDescription") in my case. The problem is that in all cases the description is dumped in raw form:

if (details == VMINFO_MACHINEREADABLE)

RTPrintf("description=\"%ls\"\n", description.raw());

I use some awk to process the output of showvminfo to produce bash aliases, and the eval croaks if the description contains multiple lines.

In reality everything printed as a string there should be passed through an escapifier that outputs \r\n\b\t\", etc., most notably the descriptions.