cfg parser

5/10/2018

I wanted to roll my own cfg/ini-like parser in C, it started off somewhat elegant to my low standards, however it quickly became a mess. It isn't great, but it "works".

It handles simple cfg/ini like files with 'key=value' pairs.

It's really hacky, I wouldn't really trust it for anything.

Comments are ignored, they're denoted by the '#' character.

Spaces are currently treated literally. test=123 and test = 123 are DIFFERENT, the key has a space appended and the value a space prepended in the second example.

Duplicate keys are not handled currently, the cfggetvalue function will only give you the first value.

See settings.cfg for an example cfg file.

To compile type make. Run the example program by issuing ./example.

All functions return 0 on failure, this goes for getting a value, always check 0 isn't returned. If it is, that means the key was not found.

Writing back to the cfg file is NOT implemented.

main.c has a usage example, however the usage structure is like this:

// allocate memory for the cfg structure
struct cfgfile *cfg = malloc(sizeof(struct cfgfile));
// setup cfg structure passing it the cfg structure we just made and a file name
cfgsetup(cfg, "filename.cfg");

// create a buffer for our value
char buffer[256];
// collect our value, the function returns 0 on a failure (when it cannot find the key)
int val;
val = cfggetvalue(cfg, "key", buffer, sizeof(buffer));
if (val != 0)
	puts(buffer); // print our value
else
	puts("cannot find the key!");

// free all of our memory (including cfg itself)
cfgfree(cfg);