Beluki / mINI

A minimal, customizable INI reader for .NET in a single abstract class.

About

mINI is a very minimal INI reader. I wrote it because I needed to populate a ContextMenu at runtime from an INI file each time the user clicks on it. Most readers I tried were either overkill, too slow for realtime reloading or didn't support nested sections.

mINI is stateless and does nothing by itself. It doesn't build data structures to hold the INI file contents. It's an abstract class with a bunch of virtual methods. You override the methods to decide what to do with your data.

For example, you override OnSection(String section) to do something when a section is found or OnValueEmpty(String key) to report an error when a key has no value. The default implementation for all methods does nothing, so you only need to override the ones you want to handle.

mINI is currently used on both GaGa, a radio player for the Windows tray and on Yava a portable game/emulator launcher.

INI syntax

mINI supports the following syntax:

# comment
key with spaces = value at root

[section]
key = value
key = value

; another comment, semicolon syntax
[section/subsection/more subsections]
key = value

Spaces are trimmed around sections, keys and values before calling methods. Blank lines can trigger custom actions with OnEmpty(). Case sensitivity and duplicate sections are allowed, it's up to the implementation class to decide what to do with them.

mINI never raises exceptions. It works line by line. The only public method is ReadLine(String line). When a line can't be read, it calls OnUnknown(String line).

Portability

mINI is tested on Windows 7 and 8, using the .NET Framework 4.0+. Older versions of .NET all the way back to 2.0 should work. Mono should work. It has no external dependencies.

Alternatives

mINI is simple and lightweight, but sometimes you need a full-featured library that can also write to INI files, merge them, etc... For those cases, I recommend ini-parser.

Status

This program is finished!

mINI is feature-complete and has no known bugs. Unless issues are reported I plan no further development on it other than maintenance.

License

Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though.