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

The code in joerage's answer is inspiring.

Unfortunately, it changes the character casing of the keys and does not handle comments. So I wrote something that should be robust enough to read (only) very dirty INI files and allows to retrieve keys as they are.

It uses some LINQ, a nested case insensitive string dictionary to store sections, keys and values, and read the file in one go.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;

class IniReader
{
    Dictionary> ini = new Dictionary>(StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);

    public IniReader(string file)
    {
        var txt = File.ReadAllText(file);

        Dictionary currentSection = new Dictionary(StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);

        ini[""] = currentSection;

        foreach(var line in txt.Split(new[]{"\n"}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
                               .Where(t => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(t))
                               .Select(t => t.Trim()))
        {
            if (line.StartsWith(";"))
                continue;

            if (line.StartsWith("[") && line.EndsWith("]"))
            {
                currentSection = new Dictionary(StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);
                ini[line.Substring(1, line.LastIndexOf("]") - 1)] = currentSection;
                continue;
            }

            var idx = line.IndexOf("=");
            if (idx == -1)
                currentSection[line] = "";
            else
                currentSection[line.Substring(0, idx)] = line.Substring(idx + 1);
        }
    }

    public string GetValue(string key)
    {
        return GetValue(key, "", "");
    }

    public string GetValue(string key, string section)
    {
        return GetValue(key, section, "");
    }

    public string GetValue(string key, string section, string @default)
    {
        if (!ini.ContainsKey(section))
            return @default;

        if (!ini[section].ContainsKey(key))
            return @default;

        return ini[section][key];
    }

    public string[] GetKeys(string section)
    {
        if (!ini.ContainsKey(section))
            return new string[0];

        return ini[section].Keys.ToArray();
    }

    public string[] GetSections()
    {
        return ini.Keys.Where(t => t != "").ToArray();
    }
}