INI File Replacement API

An object-oriented replacement for working with INI files. More...

Data Structures
class	utf8::IniFile
	Operations on INI files. More...

Detailed Description

An object-oriented replacement for working with INI files.

The basic Windows API functions for reading and writing INI files, [GetPrivateProfileStringW] (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-getprivateprofilestringw) and [WritePrivateProfileStringW] (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-writeprivateprofilestringw), combine both the file name and the information to be read or written in one API call.

Using the utf8::widen() function to convert all strings passed to this API produces an INI file that contains UTF-16 characters.

The solution is to completely replace the Windows API functions with an IniFile object that is UTF-8 aware and provides a rich interface.

This implementation struggles to be as compatible as possible with the original Windows API. There are no arbitrary extensions to the file format and I've done a lot of testing to identify different corner cases. Here are the rules I discovered by trying different combination of calls to the original Windows API:

• the only comments lines are the ones starting with a semi-colon (hashes are not considered comments by Windows API)
• there are no trailing comments; anything after the '=' sign is part of the key value
• leading and trailing spaces are removed both from returned strings and from parameters

The only changes compared to the Windows API are:

• line length defaults to 1024 (the INI_BUFFER_SIZE value) while Windows API limits it to 256 characters
• files without a path are in current directory while Windows API places them in Windows folder