CIniFile

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Introduction

In every program I have written, I end up using some sort of INI file to keep settings from one run to the next. Instead of implementing it separately in each program, I finally got around to writing this class, CIniFile. It is simple to set up and use.

After you create your CIniFile object, call the member function SetPath(CString newpath) to set the path/filename for the INI file to read from and write to.

To read the INI file data into the class, call ReadFile().

To retrieve data from the class, use GetValue or one of its overloads:

//returns value of keyname/valuename as CString
CString GetValue(CString keyname, CString valuename);

//returns value of keyname/valuename as int
int GetValueI(CString keyname, CString valuename);
 
//returns value of keyname/valuename as double
double GetValueF(CString keyname, CString valuename);

To set data values in the class, call SetValue or one of its overloads:

bool SetValue(CString key, CString valuename, CString value, bool create = 1); 
bool SetValueI(CString key, CString valuename, int value, bool create = 1);
bool SetValueF(CString key, CString valuename, double value, bool create = 1);

Use the optional parameter create as false if you do not want it to create the key/value if it doesn't already exist.

SetValue returns TRUE if the value was successfully stored, FALSE otherwise.

To delete a value from the class, call DeleteValue(CString keyname, CString valuename). This function will return TRUE if the value is deleted, FALSE otherwise.

To delete an entire key from the class, call DeleteKey(CString keyname). This function will return TRUE if the key is deleted, FALSE otherwise.

To remove all data stored in the class, call Reset().

Other useful functions are GetNumKeys() which returns the number of keys in the INI file and GetNumValues(CString keyname) which returns the number of values stored in the specified key.

Finally, to write all your stored data to the specified INI file, call WriteFile().

That's it! It is simple.

Email comments to cabadam@tamu.edu.

Updates

• 5 May 2000

  Updated source and demo files.

• 2 March 2003

  It has been a long time since I've looked at this article, but as there has been a lot of interest in the non-MFC version of this class, I decided to go ahead and upload it here. As the non-MFC version, rewritten by Shane Hill, contains many more features, I've decided to remove the original MFC class from here. This means a couple things. First - the demo picture at the top of this article is wrong. There are no spaces surrounding the '=' sign. Also, even though the class contains many more features, the basic operation of the class remains the same for the most part. New features include the ability to enumerate existing keys and values and to add comments into the INI file. For the new additions, see the well documented header file.