What is the best file format for configuration file? [closed]

Answer 1

*.ini should be pretty good for that

[MyApp]
var1 = "foo"
var2 = "bar"

[MyPlugin]
var1 = "qwe"

You can easily read it using parse_ini_file()

$config = parse_ini_file('/path/to/config/file', true);
echo $config['MyApp']['var2'];

Answer 2

Joomla recently switched from ini files to JSON encoded files. Encoding and decoding json using json_encode() and json_decode() performs better than reading and writing ini files.

There is a drawback however: json is not easily human readable. You need to use a php script to encode your config file. You can use this solution well when you want to write your config in an administrator part of your website.

Answer 3

What do you plan on putting in there?

You have loads of options:

• XML with custom tags
• Key-Value pairs on each new line
• SQLite?

Answer 4

JSON is a good choice, in my opinion. You could define your database schema as such:

{
    table1: {
        id: {
            type:"int",
            autoincrement:true
        },
        some_field: {
            type:"string",
        }
    },
    table2: { // etc
    }
}

Then just use json_decode to turn this into a PHP array.

e.g.

$tables = json_decode($json_text);
foreach ($tables as $tablename => $t) {
    foreach ($t as $fieldname => $field) {
        echo "Table {$tablename} has a record called {$fieldname}";
    }
}

This would print: Table table1 has a record called id Table table1 has a record called some_field

JSON is much easier to work with than XML in my opinion, and json_encode/decode is very fast so there's little overhead. In my opinion, it's also a lot more readable than XML and copes better with complex data structures than INI files. Some people prefer YAML, but there's really not much difference in syntax.

Answer 5

XML is best for this purpose as most programming langauge privide API to read XML files.

Answer 6

The guys have really given you good answers already. Personally I like .ini files outside your document root. Also make sure (if you're on a linux hosting env) that your file is only readable by your web server and not writable.

You can then simply parse the INI file and use your configuration settings like that. (this is if you're using a language such as PHP or so, JavaScript ect won't work here.)

But it's like they said. It all depends on what data you want to have in your config file and what you want todo with it.

Regards Conrad c'',)