Reading/writing an INI file

Question

Is there any class in the .NET framework that can read/write standard .ini files:

[Section]
=
...

Delphi has th

Answer 1

I'm late to join the party, but I had the same issue today and I've written the following implementation:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

static bool match(this string str, string pat, out Match m) =>
    (m = Regex.Match(str, pat, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)).Success;

static void Main()
{
    Dictionary> ini = new Dictionary>();
    string section = "";

    foreach (string line in File.ReadAllLines(.........)) // read from file
    {
        string ln = (line.Contains('#') ? line.Remove(line.IndexOf('#')) : line).Trim();

        if (ln.match(@"^[ \t]*\[(?[\w\-]+)\]", out Match m))
            section = m.Groups["sec"].ToString();
        else if (ln.match(@"^[ \t]*(?[\w\-]+)\=(?.*)", out m))
        {
            if (!ini.ContainsKey(section))
                ini[section] = new Dictionary();

            ini[section][m.Groups["prop"].ToString()] = m.Groups["val"].ToString();
        }
    }


    // access the ini file as follows:
    string content = ini["section"]["property"];
}

It must be noted, that this implementation does not handle sections or properties which are not found. To achieve this, you should extend the Dictionary<,>-class to handle unfound keys.

---

To serialize an instance of Dictionary> to an .ini-file, I use the following code:

string targetpath = .........;
Dictionary> ini = ........;
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

foreach (string section in ini.Keys)
{
    sb.AppendLine($"[{section}]");

    foreach (string property in ini[section].Keys)
        sb.AppendLine($"{property}={ini[section][property]");
}

File.WriteAllText(targetpath, sb.ToString());