38 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
[/
|
|
/ Copyright (c) 2008 Marcin Kalicinski (kalita <at> poczta dot onet dot pl)
|
|
/ Copyright (c) 2009 Sebastian Redl (sebastian dot redl <at> getdesigned dot at)
|
|
/
|
|
/ Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
|
|
/ file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
|
|
/]
|
|
[section INI Parser]
|
|
[def __ini__ [@http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI INI format]]
|
|
The __ini__ was once widely used in the world of Windows. It is now deprecated,
|
|
but is still used by a surprisingly large number of applications. The reason is
|
|
probably its simplicity, plus that Microsoft recommends using the registry as
|
|
a replacement, which not all developers want to do.
|
|
|
|
INI is a simple key-value format with a single level of sectioning. It is thus
|
|
less rich than the property tree dataset, which means that not all property
|
|
trees can be serialized as INI files.
|
|
|
|
The INI parser creates a tree node for every section, and a child node for
|
|
every property in that section. All properties not in a section are directly
|
|
added to the root node. Empty sections are ignored. (They don't round-trip, as
|
|
described below.)
|
|
|
|
The INI serializer reverses this process. It first writes out every child of the
|
|
root that contains data, but no child nodes, as properties. Then it creates a
|
|
section for every child that contains child nodes, but no data. The children of
|
|
the sections must only contain data. It is an error if the root node contains
|
|
data, or any child of the root contains both data and content, or there's more
|
|
than three levels of hierarchy. There must also not be any duplicate keys.
|
|
|
|
An empty tree node is assumed to be an empty property. There is no way to create
|
|
empty sections.
|
|
|
|
Since the Windows INI parser discards trailing spaces and does not support
|
|
quoting, the property tree parser follows this example. This means that
|
|
property values containing trailing spaces do not round-trip.
|
|
[endsect] [/ini_parser]
|