MiniINI version 0.8.0

Introduction

MiniINI is a a free/open source, minimalistic, simple to use C++ library for reading ini (aka cfg) files. It has no dependencies (that might change in the future, but it is unlikely) and should compile on any platform with a standards compliant compiler. (only a makefile for GCC is included at the moment, though)

Main priority of MiniINI is, as its name suggests, minimalism and speed. Its goal is to create fastest ini library possible supporting the most common ini features without sacrificing ease of use. MiniINI should be especially useful for game development, for instance game settings, properties of units in strategy games, etc. MiniINI is already very fast. It takes under 70 ms to load, parse and unload an INI file about 1MB large with 512 sections according to benchmarks, even with debug build. This is on a ~1.7 Ghz dual-core machine (although MiniINI can only use one core).

Debug build of MiniINI can also check ini files it reads, and issue warnings for the most common mistakes in ini code. This should be useful mainly for users of programs based on MiniINI, for instance game modders.

At the moment, MiniINI can only read ini files, not write to them. This should change in future versions.

You can get newest versions of MiniINI at https://launchpad.net/miniini .

INI file format

INI files are text files containing simple values formatted as tag=value pairs, for example:

answer=42

These are grouped in ini sections which start by headers containing names in square brackets, for example:

[section]

Optionally, ini files can contain comments, which are ignored. Comments usually start by a semicolon (default in MiniINI) or hash and continue to the end of line. Example:

tag=value ;comment

A simple complete ini file example:

[General]
OS=Linux
Version=0.4
Renderers=OpenGLRenderer, SWRenderer
CurrentRenderer=OpenGLRenderer

[OpenGLRenderer]
ScreenWidth=1024
ScreenHeight=768
UseShaders=true

Features

• Reads most common ini/cfg files, or from user provided buffer containing contents of an ini/cfg file. This allows the user e.g. to load data from a compressed file and pass it to MiniINI.
• Well documented both with API documenation and tutorials.
• Can read headerless ini/cfg files. Stores all tags before the first (if any) header in a default section.
• Reads only plain ASCII files. There is no support for Unicode, and there probably never will be.
• Extremely fast. Even multi-MB ini files with hundreds or thousands of sections can be processed in fractions of a second.
• Case-sensitive. That means that [CASE], [case] and [Case] are not the same and there is a difference between Tag= and TAG=
• Provides methods to read strings, integers, floating point numbers and booleans from ini files and checks the ini data for errors, allowing the programmer to use their own default values.
• Can read arrays of data from tags with multiple, comma separated values.
• Supports iteration over contents of INI files.
• In debug build, can issue warnings to the user using a callback function specified by the programmer. For example when a tag from which the program tries to load an integer contains something else.
• Can also read arrays of data from numbered sequences of tags, for example: + + a1=1 + a2=2 + a3=3 + +
• Supports both plain strings and arrays and STL strings and vectors. STL functionality can be disabled for more minimalism.
• Cannot write to ini files at this time. This should be implemented in future.
• Ignores *all* spaces, i.e. no spaces/tabs in tags or values. For example: + + tag=125685 + and + t a g = 125 685 + + both have the same meaning. Spaces _might_ be supported in the future for values, if there will be a need, but are not planned at the moment.
• Supports single line comments with a *configurable* comment character. So if you want to use *#* instead of *;* , you can. There is no support for multiple comment characters at the same time for performance reasons.
• Name=value separator is configurable as well, '=' by default.
• Does _not_ support multiline comments, like C /* */ comments. This is planned to be implemented in future.

New in this release

Most changes in MiniINI 0.8 are under the hood, making it more robust and faster. The most important interface addition is the iterating functionality.

It is now possible to iterate over tags and sections in INI files. See the new tutorial on iteration for details.

Integer and floating point parsing doesn't use C functions strtol and strtof anymore. They were replaced by custom functions, greatly improving performance when reading floats, ints and also somewhat speeding up loading of sequences of numbered tags into arrays.

Due to above parsing changes, hexadecimal, octal integers, scientific notation of floats and thousand separator characters are not supported anymore.

Integer overflows are treated as warnings instead of errors, reading the largest or smallest possible integer.

The bug that caused MiniINI to warn about default section being empty (that caused warnings with any files that had no tags before the first section) is now fixed.

Other small bugfixes, refactoring and documentation improvements.

Compiling/Installing/Using

Directory structure

MiniINI files are split into multiple directories:

 ./         (top-level directory) MiniINI include file and this readme.

 ./miniini  MiniINI source code        

 ./bin      Compiled binary files, e.g. the library itself.

 ./doc      Documentation for MiniINI.

 ./example  Example MiniINI programs.

 ./test     Files for MiniINI regression tester and benchmark scripts.

Requirements

MiniINI should compile on any standards compliant C++ compiler, and requires no third-party libraries. MiniINI also requires basic C99 support. If you have gcc, there is a GNU makefile tested with gcc 4.x , which probably also works with older gcc versions.

MiniINI also includes some benchmarking scripts, which require Python and Valgrind to run. However, these are not necessary to compile or use MiniINI and are mainly useful for MiniINI development.

Compiling/Installing with gcc

Type *make* in terminal. Then type *make install* as a root user (e.g. *sudo make install* if you have sudo) This will compile and copy optimized MiniINI build to */usr/lib/libminiini.a* , debug build to */usr/lib/libminiini-dbg.a* , and copy miniini headers to */usr/include/.

Debug and optimized versions can also be compiled separately using *make debug* and *make optimized*

You can also uninstall MiniINI by typing *make uninstall* as a root user.

Using MiniINI

First, you will need to include miniini.h header file and link with either debug or optimized miniini build. To include MiniINI, add this line to your code:

#include<miniini.h>

To link with MiniINI using GCC, add this to your compiler options:

-lminiini 

for optimized or

-lminiini-dbg 

for debug build.

If you didn't install MiniINI, you'll also need to add path with miniini.h to header paths of your compiler and path with libminiini.a or libminiini-dbg.a to linker paths.

For more info you can check reference manual and tutorials in *./doc* directory and examples in *./example* directory.

License

MiniINI is free/open source software distributed under the MIT/X11 license. This license allows you to use MiniINI in both open and closed source software, free of charge, and modify it if you need to.

Full text of the license:

Copyright (c) 2009-2010 Ferdinand Majerech

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Contact/Credits

MiniINI homepage at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/miniini

MiniINI was created by Ferdinand Majerech aka Kiith-Sa kiithsacmp[AT]gmail.com

MiniINI was created using Vim and GCC on Ubuntu Linux, as an ini reading library for Catom https://launchpad.net/catom .