INI File Reader/Writer

[Crimson Wizard]

A separate class for reading values by keys from ini file (for reading ASG setup).

Probably this would be nice if there was a parent class for reading keys/values from a tree-like data structure. Then it will be easier to chnage underlying implementation from ini file to something else if we want in the future.

[Joseph DiPerla]

How about an XML reading class?

[Crimson Wizard]

How about an XML reading class?

That's something I implied by saying "Then it will be easier to chnage underlying implementation from ini file to something else if we want in the future.", but since I do not know for sure if we ever need reading XML, I used that abstract "something else"

[JJS]

Does it really have to be tree-like with arbitrary depth or doesn't ini-like with "category -> name -> value" suffice? I think this would be enough, especially since an ini file cannot represent a tree structure.

I don't like the idea of introducing an xml-parser dependency just for reading values that are equally well represented in an ini file.

But deriving from a generic base class is a good idea. I would allow handling of ini-files and maybe the Windows registry in derived classes.

[Crimson Wizard]

Does it really have to be tree-like with arbitrary depth or doesn't ini-like with "category -> name -> value" suffice? I think this would be enough, especially since an ini file cannot represent a tree structure.

I don't like the idea of introducing an xml-parser dependency just for reading values that are equally well represented in an ini file.

Yes, on second thought full XML-like support in base class is too much.
However, I suppose that simple tree-like structure could be useful for other purposes (including registry reading, which, unlike ini-file, can have nested "categories") and, on other hand, won't make reading from ini unnecessarily heavy code-wise; I am thinking about something like this:
(hypothetical example)

Code: C++

1. CKeyValueTree *root = CKeyValueTree::Open(filename);
2. CKeyValueTree *gfx = root->FindTree("graphics");
3.  
4. if (gfx)
5. {
6.    screen_width = gfx->ReadInt32("screenwidth", 320 /*default value*/);
7.    screen_height = gfx->ReadInt32("screenheight", 240);
8.    screen_bpp = gfx->ReadInt8("bpp", 16);
9. }
10.  
11. CKeyValueTree *snd = root->FindTree("sound");
12.  
13. if (sound)
14. {
15.    sound_enabled = gfx->ReadBool("soundon", true);
16. }
17. ... etc ...
18.