Fini

Fini is a performance-optimized ini parser that supports strings, booleans, integers and floats.

Syntax for ini files

• A section is marked with [section]
• Key-value pairs are separated by an equals sign, eg. "key = value"
• Quotations for strings are optional
• Lines beginning with ; are comments
• Literal "true" and "false" (without quotes) as the value will be converted to boolean
• A number without a period will be converted into an integer
• A number with one period will be converted into a float
• Keys can be any arbitrary string as long as it doesn't contain an equals sign, and are kept as strings

Sections can also have sub-sections by appending the sub-section's name to the section with a period, eg: [section.subsection]

Subsections will be hashes in the section with the sub-section name as the key (symbol).

Sample ini content

A basic ini might look like this:

[section]
string = some text
boolean = true
number = 1

[section.subsection]
key = value

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fini'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fini

Usage

The quickest way to use Fini is to invoke the module method parse:

require 'fini'

data = Fini.parse(ini)

The data variable will now contain an IniObject where each section is a method. If using the sample ini from above, you might access data like this:

data.section 'string'
# => "some text"

# Array notation works as well
data.section['string']
# => "some text"

You can also supply a default value as a second argument, which is nil by default:

data.section 'does not exist', 'none'
# => "none"

data.section 'does not exist'
# => nil

Subsections

Fini also supports subsections. Here's an ini file with a use case:

[server.testing]
database = foo
user = fooman
password = foopass

[server.staging]
database = stagefoo
user = foomanstage
password = foopassstage

Subsections are added as symbol keys to the section, and are just basic hashes from there on:

data.server[:testing]
# => {'database' => 'foo', 'user' => 'fooman', 'password' => 'foopass'}

data.server[:testing]['database']
# => "foo"

Instance usage

If an instance object is needed, Fini has Fini::Ini with the methods parse and load. load is a convenience method for loading an ini file instead of a string.

require 'fini'

parser = Fini::Ini.new
data = parser.parse(ini)

data2 = parser.load('path/to/ini.ini')

Planned features

• An option to convert all keys to symbols
• Support for escape characters in quoted strings
• Support for symbol values

License

MIT license.