This is a native Ruby package for reading and writing INI files.
Although made popular by Windows, INI files can be used on any system thanks to their flexibility. They allow a program to store configuration data, which can then be easily parsed and changed. Two notable systems that use the INI format are Samba and Trac.
More information about INI files can be found on the Wikipedia Page.
The basic element contained in an INI file is the property. Every property has a name and a value, delimited by an equals sign =. The name appears to the left of the equals sign and the value to the right.
name=value
Section declarations start with [ and end with ] as in [section1] and
[section2] shown in the example below. The section declaration marks the
beginning of a section. All properties after the section declaration will be
associated with that section.
All lines beginning with a semicolon ; or a number sign # are considered to be comments. Comment lines are ignored when parsing INI files.
A typical INI file might look like this:
[section1]
; some comment on section1
var1 = foo
var2 = doodle
var3 = multiline values \
are also possible
[section2]
# another comment
var1 = baz
var2 = shoodle
The format of INI files is not well defined. Several assumptions are made by the inifile gem when parsing INI files. Most of these assumptions can be modified at, but the defaults are listed below.
If the INI file lacks any section declarations, or if there are properties
decalared before the first section, then these properties will be placed into
a default "global" section. The name of this section can be configured when
creating an IniFile instance.
Duplicate properties are allowed in a single section. The last property value
set is the one that will be stored in the IniFile instance.
[section1]
var1 = foo
var2 = bar
var1 = poodle
The resulting value of var1 will be poodle.
If you have more than one section with the same name then the sections will be merged. Duplicate properties between the two sections will follow the rules discussed above. Properties in the latter section will override properties in the earlier section.
The comment character can be either a semicolon ; or a number sign #. The comment character must be the first non-whitespace character on the line. This means it is perfectly valid to include a comment character inside a value or event a property name (although this is not recommended). For this reason, comments cannot be placed on the end of a line after a name/value pair.
Several escape characters are supported within the value for a property. Most notably, a backslash ** at the end of a line will continue the value onto the next line. When parsed, a literal newline will appear in the value.
- \0 -- null character
- \n -- newline character
- \r -- carriage return character
- \t -- tab character
- \\ -- backslash character
The backslash escape sequence is only needed if you want one of the escape sequences to appear literally in your value. For example:
property=this is not a tab \\t character
gem install inifile
To run the tests:
$ rake
Contributions are gladly welcome! For small modifications (fixing typos, improving documentation) you can use GitHub's in-browser editing capabilities to create a pull request. For larger modifications I would recommend forking the project, creating your patch, and then submitting a pull request.
Mr Bones is used to manage rake tasks and to install dependent files. To setup your environment ...
$ gem install bones
$ rake gem:install_dependencies
And always remember that rake -T will show you the list of available tasks.
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