[syslog-ng] character handling in kv-parser

[David Boles (dboles)]

I am trying to process structured data coming from the Linux kernel's printk_emit() function which shows up on /dev/kmesg. Since printk_emit() forces you to flatten hierarchical data into key/value pairs I use a character delimiter between pieces of the key. So, with the '!' character as a separator something that looks like { "cat": { "family" : "mammal" } } would become "cat!family=mammal".

When I use a kv-parser, and I use characters like '.', '$', '!', '+' or '^' as a separator the parser seems to just discard everything in the key except the last part. Alphabetic characters and '_' appear to work - but they are the most likely to conflict with other strings. 

Is there some way to tell the kv-parser to only consider '=' as special (or whatever the separator was defined to be) and keep my keys intact?

Thanks,

 - db