CDataFile2 is a fork of CDataFile written originally in July 2002 by Gary McNickle. The original readme follows.
Almost as soon as your application becomes something more than "Hello World", you find yourself in need of a means to persistently store configuration settings or other data. The registry is generally a bad place for more than a few settings because of it's limited size and difficulty of use. The common method is to use some form of configuration file.
CDataFile is a C++ object who's purpose is to aid you in reading and writing to configuration files. It generally tries to be compatible with standard Windows .ini files, although it has some features that, if used, will break that compatiblity. (namely non-standard comment indicators and quoted key/value values).
While I'm not a huge fan of std::string (and honestly, not all that familiar with it), I felt that it would be the best choice here. It's certainly portable and does not rely on MFC or any other third party libraries. The lack of features in std::string made me nearly regret that choice early on.
Sample documentation for the class exists within the source code and the provided test project.
CDataFile2
- Platform independant
- No reliance on windows system calls. You should be able to use this code, with minor modifications, in your Linux applications as well as your Windows.
- Support for multi-line comments for both sections and keys
- Multiple section support. This allows you to have duplicate keys, with possibly differing values (or the same for that matter)
- Full string support allows you to have key names or values which contain spaces.
- Easily configurable to your tastes by changing simple, well documented flags.
- Simple error/message reporting functionality.
- Can read and write Windows .ini files.
- Small, concise and well commented.