kpINI

Description

Finally, ten years later, I've made available what I consider to be a fairly useful little drop-in INI file manipulation class. Originally, this kpINI sample was offered in 16-bit form for VB3 on CompuServe's old MSBASIC forum. And there it was one of the most-downloaded samples available.  But I never really offered anything comparable for Win32, and I can't totally defend that. I guess I was just never happy myself with having adequately abstracted this most simple of all configuration options. Well, I think this one is now pretty nice.

What I'm offering is a VB5/6/A class module that you can drop right into any project, and begin using immediately. You instantiate it, tell it the name/location of the INI file you want to manipulate, and begin reading and/or writing. For discovery purposes, the class can iterate through entire files and within each section therein, raising events for every element it encounters. You can query specific entries in specific sections, specifying default values as you wish. Values are returned as String by default, but methods are offered to easily reinterpret them as numeric or boolean instead. 

nOpt = ini.ToLong(ini.EntryRead("Options", "0", "General"))

The class caches the current file and section. This means that if you read/write a number of entries from a single section in succession, you need only specify the section on the first call. Entire sections can be read into a Variant array, even. I often use this to get a list of all the entries in the section, then process each one in turn.

Color-coded with vbMarkUp - try it today!
Dim i As Long
Dim arr As Variant
Dim Dest As String

' Look at all the files we need to copy.
arr = ini.SectionRead(False, "Files")
If IsArray(arr) = False Then Exit Function

' Loop through each entry in this section
For i = LBound(arr) To UBound(arr)
   Dest = ini.EntryRead(arr(i))
   ' Code to this copy file...
Next i

INI file comments are denoted by semi-colons, and automatically stripped from each entry if desired. It would be fairly trivial to add another method to the class which would accept alternate comment characters, if for some reason the semi-colon wasn't appropriate.

Published

This sample, or the one from which it originally derived, was published (or at least peripherally mentioned) in the following article(s):

APIs Usage

This sample uses the following API calls:

Module Library Function
CIniFile.cls kernel32


 GetPrivateProfileSection
GetPrivateProfileSectionNames
GetPrivateProfileString
WritePrivateProfileString
INIEDIT.FRM user SendMessage
INIFILE.BAS kernel






user		 GetPrivateProfileInt
GetPrivateProfileString
GetProfileInt
GetProfileString
GetWindowsDirectory
WritePrivateProfileString
WriteProfileString
SendMessage

Don't see what you're looking for? Here's a complete API cross-reference.

Download

Download kpINI.zip   Please, enjoy and learn from this sample. Include its code within your own projects, if you wish. But, in order to insure only the most recent code is available to all, I ask that you don't share the sample by any form of mass distribution.

Download kpINI.zip, 17Kb, Last Updated: Thursday, May 12, 2005

See Also

The following resources may also be of interest: