Thanks everyone, this is all very helpful.

"text":
Great.  Can use search, works fine.

"coll":
My understanding is that 'coll' is NOT a part of vanilla, but rather a part of 'cyclone', not maintained by Miller.  Since I'm looking for a pure Vanilla solution, this is not a good choice.  right?

"struct":
I understand that you can invent complex data structures with this object.  My 2 questions are:
-is there an easy/out-of-the-vanilla-box way to go from text files to struct?
-i don't see how struct implements the "key" of my desired key/value pair.  is that the name of the pd subpatch that has the struct object in it?

Thanks also for the hot PuRestJson tip, will look into that for future adventures.

ali


On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 2:54 PM, Peter Nyboer <p@nbor.us> wrote:
Maybe PuRestJson fits the bill?
I checked this out a while ago on CHIP using vanilla. I had some issues that were eventually fixed, but I ended up doing the bulk of the work in python then passing some control data over to PD via OSC. 
I was using it to load data from EchoNest into a PD patch. 
But it probably will do what you want.


Peter