AutoHotkey Community

[ImprisonedPride]

Hey. I have an app where the user is allowed to add to a .ini file. The [Heading] of this section can be anything the user desires, so I need a way to be able to loop through the ini file for x number of sections who's names I don't know. Is this at all possible? I didn't see anything under IniRead.
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[Icarus]

Thats a good question.

I also needed to do something similar many times, and I have two methods of solving it for you:

1. You do your own reading of the file using FileRead - you then go and look for lines that start with "[" to recognize a section, lines that look like *=* to recognize a key=value and so on. If you are just starting with AHK, this may be too much to start with, unless you have experience in other pgoramming languages.

2. Another way, is to have a known key that contains a comma separated list of the sections to read. For example

[ImprisonedPride]

Thanks a ton icarus, I had already started to develop a method as you described as #1. The problem with #2 is that the general list would be dynamic as well, since the user is able to add/delete things from the file. So then I'd have to rewrite that value to omit the value deleted from the list by splitting said value and looping through it... ugh. You can probably see why I'll do it with method #1. I have strong backgrounds in other languages like Flash Actionscript and C++, but I'm still very new to function names of AHK. Thanks again.
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Call me IP.

[Icarus]

With what you describe, I would still go with method #2 - it is much easier to manage. The full "MyIniRead" method is an overkill for your task.

You do not need to delete things from the list - you can just recreate it whenever it changes by the users input.

If your code does not allow for such implementation (although I cant imagine why), you may still be able to delete stuff from the list easily.

Two methods I use:
1. Is to use a RegExReplace that looks for a word that is between commas or between a comma and an end/beginning of a line
2. You make the list so that each word ALWAYS has two blockers around it, and then you use StringReplace (e.g. Sections=|Section 1||Nikita||Operations|

I would recommend to first try the easier solutions.

EDIT: Another suggestion, is to drop the use of INI altogether in this case, and just use your own format - so that each line contains all the information a section would contain, and then you just read the file, and parse each line as you need.

Example:

Section 1:param1,param2,param3
Nikita:param1,param2,param3

[ImprisonedPride]

I wound up going with method 2 because I'd already compiled the .ini file. It was a ton easier to implement than I thought it would be... took about 15 minutes. Thanks a lot!

Also, I think deleting from the INI would be a cinch case:

1.Read in sections
2.Loop through, adding each one to a new string var; one that should be deleted gets skipped
3. write it back to the key in general setion
4. use IniDelete to "drop" the whole section to be deleted.
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Call me IP.

[Guest]

You might check out this thread, it is about how to get all
section names from an ini file.

http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic9093.html