SharpINI 1.1.0

SharpINI - A simple INI Reader/Writer for C#

SharpINI is a simple .NET Standard 2.0 compatible library to parse and write INI strings.

INIs are somehow a problematic format, since there is no global standard like for JSON or XML. There are so many implementations that parse the files using different rules. This library tries to provide an interface with parsing options to parse some of the INI files out there without creating too much complexity.

Flexibility

This library allows the following things to be defined while parsing:

• Space chars
• Line breaks (limited)
• Comment chars (only at the beginning of a line)
• Behaviour when there are multiple sections with the same name
• Behaviour when there are multiple keys in a section with the same name
• Behaviour when there are strings outside of a section (when no section has been started)
• Removing spaces before and after value

General parsing rules

These rules are hard and cannot be changed using parsing options

• Any space at the start of a line is removed
• Any space between the key of a key-value-pair and the = is removed
• Section titles must not contain closing brackets (]) in their name
• Any line must be a section title, a key-value pair, an empty line (filled with space) or a comment line

Reading

SharpINI parses the string into the following format:

• Each Section is represented as Dictionary<string, string>
• The INI file is represented as Dictionary<string, Dictionary<string, string>>

See Types-section for more information

Basic reading

using SharpINI;

var myINIString = @"[MySection]
Key1=val1
Key2=val2

[MySection2]
Key1=val3
Key2=val4";

var parsed = INIReader.ReadINI(myINIString);
/*parsed:
[
	[MySection,
		[Key1, val1]
		[Key2, val2]
	],
	[MySection2,
		[Key1, val3]
		[Key2, val4]
	]
]
*/

var key = parsed["MySection"]["Key1"]; // => "val1"

NuGet supports only up to 8000 bytes for the documentation. Please read the full docu on Github