Physical access to a file [IniRead vs FileRead]

[kidbit]

How does IniRead in ahk actually work? Does it attempt to access the file every time the IniRead is invoked? Or does it actually cache the whole file upon first IniRead and later calls to the cache?

I'm thinking of re-writing my existing script so that it would read the settings.ini once via FileRead, but since that file is INI formatted - I'd need to write functions to work with a variable like with a file.
But I'm not sure if that's all worth the efforts.

[Guest]

As far as I know each IniRead will indeed access the file each time, so if you have many read/writes and a large INI it might be worth the effort. There are several INI libraries posted on the other forum which will take care of all your problems, there are those working with variables and those that return an object, just use what you think is best.

[Verdlin]

*Shameless self-promotion*

class_EasyIni

[kidbit]

I've counted how many times I use iniread/iniwrite in my script with the account of the probability of each of them to actually get executed and it appears that it's quite a small number.
However, quite much of the script's code describes how to parse the iniRead data, I have to manually use it to fulfill the arrays.
Verdlin thanks for that script, but seems like it'd be an overkill for my script.
I think I'll stick to IniWrite/Read, but will optimize them.

[nnnik]

You can also create a binary file with the File Object.

[kidbit]

nnnik
could you demonstrate how to do that?

[nnnik]

Code: Select all

savesettingstofile(filename)
file:=fileopen(filename,"rw")
S:=""
A:={}
File.rawread(s,100)
A.setting1:=Numget(s,0,"uint")
A.setting2:=numget(s,4,"float")
A.setting3:=stringget(&s+8,92,"utf-8")
}

[Wade Hatler]

INI files are read every time but the drive caches the file so they're quite fast. I've used them for years with quite a few variables and even timed it to make sure it was ok. Don't have the numbers still, but it's easy to make a little timer to test them with A_TickCount.

If you want to bulk process them, an easy way is to read the whole [Section] with IniRead with a blank parameter for the value. Then split the result with a RegEx, or use Loop, Parse to work each line. I do that then I don't know in advance what the value names are or when i'm searching for values on the right of the =.

I have an example I could post if you're interested.