I don't want to use any of the usual things like JSON, XML etc because this has got to be extremely light weight as it's going to be embedded

That's fine. I still encourage you to structure your lightweight script file into (unit-testable) subroutines at the top of the file, with each subroutine having well-defined inputs and outputs and not relying on global data ... followed by a short mainline at the end.

A simple example of this approach can be found in this node. 

👁️🍾👍🦟

In reply to Re^3: Reading into array with sscanf by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Reading into array with sscanf by colintu

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