ANSI C INI File Parsing and Creation Library

I know that there's no shortage of libraries out there for parsing INI files, but I just wanted one that could read in all of the (section, key, value) entries when my program starts and write them out before my program quits, so I thought that I'd write my own. Now I'm sharing it with everybody under version 3 of the GNU LGPL.

I'm not sure how you got here, or if you know what an INI file is. If you don't know about INI files, you should read Wikipedia's article on INI files.

Information on downloading the source code for all of my INI paser and creator implementations may be found here.

The rest of this page discusses the results of my efforts so far.

EZIni Implementation

Unfortunately (or fortunately), there is no standard INI file format, so I supported the format variations that felt right (or were easy). here's what I came up with:

Any line starting with a semicolon (';') or octothorpe ('#') will be treated as a comment and skipped
The parser will return Section, Key, and Value strings using the case that the INI file uses
The writer will write Section, Key, and Value strings with the case that it is given
The writer will sort entries by Section using the C strcmp() function. Consequently section names are case sensitive
If the INI file contains duplicate entries with the same Section and Key, the parser will return both of them in the order discovered
If the writer is provided multiple entries with the same Section and Key, it will write the last one that it was provided to the INI file
The parser will strip white spaces on both sides of the Section name and the Value string. Only trailing white spaces will be stripped from the Key string

Documentation

Doxygen generated documentation of the EZIni Library may be found in my repository's docs directory.

Examples

An example of how to use GetEntryFromFile() and MakeINIFile() may be found in sample.c included in the zip file containing the EZIni Library.

Portability

All the source code that I have provided is written in strict ANSI C. I would expect it to build correctly on any machine with an ANSI C compiler, supporting it's file abstractions. I have tested the code compiled with gcc on X86_64 Linux machine.

Actual Software

I am releasing my implementation of the EZIni library under the LGPL. The source code repository is available on GitHub. I recommend that you checkout the latest revision of the master branch, unless you're looking for something specific.

Repository Location	https://github.com/michaeldipperstein/ezini

If you have any further questions or comments, you may contact me by e-mail. My e-mail address is: mdipperstein@gmail.com

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Last updated on December 25, 2018