A cross-platform library that provides a simple API to read and write INI-style configuration files. It supports data files in ASCII, MBCS and Unicode. It is designed explicitly to be portable to any platform and has been tested on Windows, WinCE and Linux. Released as open-source and free using the MIT licence.
- MIT Licence allows free use in all software (including GPL and commercial)
- multi-platform (Windows 95 to Windows 10, Windows CE, Linux, Unix)
- loading and saving of INI-style configuration files
- configuration files can have any newline format on all platforms
- liberal acceptance of file format
- key/values with no section
- removal of whitespace around sections, keys and values
- support for multi-line values (values with embedded newline characters)
- optional support for multiple keys with the same name
- optional case-insensitive sections and keys (for ASCII characters only)
- saves files with sections and keys in the same order as they were loaded
- preserves comments on the file, section and keys where possible
- supports both char or wchar_t programming interfaces
- supports both MBCS (system locale) and UTF-8 file encodings
- system locale does not need to be UTF-8 on Linux/Unix to load UTF-8 file
- support for non-ASCII characters in section, keys, values and comments
- support for non-standard character types or file encodings via user-written converter classes
- support for adding/modifying values programmatically
- should compile with no warnings in most compilers
Full documentation of the interface is available in doxygen format.
These snippets are included with the distribution in the automatic tests as ts-snippets.cpp.
// simple demonstration
CSimpleIniA ini;
ini.SetUnicode();
SI_Error rc = ini.LoadFile("example.ini");
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_OK);
const char* pv;
pv = ini.GetValue("section", "key", "default");
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value");
ini.SetValue("section", "key", "newvalue");
pv = ini.GetValue("section", "key", "default");
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "newvalue"); // load from a data file
CSimpleIniA ini;
SI_Error rc = ini.LoadFile("example.ini");
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_OK);
// load from a string
const std::string example = "[section]\nkey = value\n";
CSimpleIniA ini;
SI_Error rc = ini.LoadData(example);
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_OK); // get all sections
CSimpleIniA::TNamesDepend sections;
ini.GetAllSections(sections);
// get all keys in a section
CSimpleIniA::TNamesDepend keys;
ini.GetAllKeys("section1", keys); // get the value of a key that doesn't exist
const char* pv;
pv = ini.GetValue("section1", "key99");
ASSERT_EQ(pv, nullptr);
// get the value of a key that does exist
pv = ini.GetValue("section1", "key1");
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value1");
// get the value of a key which may have multiple
// values. If hasMultiple is true, then there are
// multiple values and just one value has been returned
bool hasMulti;
pv = ini.GetValue("section1", "key1", nullptr, &hasMulti);
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value1");
ASSERT_EQ(hasMulti, false);
pv = ini.GetValue("section1", "key2", nullptr, &hasMulti);
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value2.1");
ASSERT_EQ(hasMulti, true);
// get all values of a key with multiple values
CSimpleIniA::TNamesDepend values;
ini.GetAllValues("section1", "key2", values);
// sort the values into a known order, in this case we want
// the original load order
values.sort(CSimpleIniA::Entry::LoadOrder());
// output all of the items
CSimpleIniA::TNamesDepend::const_iterator it;
for (it = values.begin(); it != values.end(); ++it) {
printf("value = '%s'\n", it->pItem);
} // add a new section
rc = ini.SetValue("section1", nullptr, nullptr);
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_INSERTED);
// not an error to add one that already exists
rc = ini.SetValue("section1", nullptr, nullptr);
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_UPDATED);
// get the value of a key that doesn't exist
const char* pv;
pv = ini.GetValue("section2", "key1", "default-value");
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "default-value");
// adding a key (the section will be added if needed)
rc = ini.SetValue("section2", "key1", "value1");
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_INSERTED);
// ensure it is set to expected value
pv = ini.GetValue("section2", "key1", nullptr);
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value1");
// change the value of a key
rc = ini.SetValue("section2", "key1", "value2");
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_UPDATED);
// ensure it is set to expected value
pv = ini.GetValue("section2", "key1", nullptr);
ASSERT_STREQ(pv, "value2"); // deleting a key from a section. Optionally the entire
// section may be deleted if it is now empty.
bool done, deleteSectionIfEmpty = true;
done = ini.Delete("section1", "key1", deleteSectionIfEmpty);
ASSERT_EQ(done, true);
done = ini.Delete("section1", "key1");
ASSERT_EQ(done, false);
// deleting an entire section and all keys in it
done = ini.Delete("section2", nullptr);
ASSERT_EQ(done, true);
done = ini.Delete("section2", nullptr);
ASSERT_EQ(done, false); // save the data to a string
std::string data;
rc = ini.Save(data);
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_OK);
// save the data back to the file
rc = ini.SaveFile("example2.ini");
if (rc < 0) { /* handle error */ };
ASSERT_EQ(rc, SI_OK);