Reading .ini files

martymart has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow Monks, I have an .ini file that I'd like to put into a hash, it's of the format:

$xmldir="c:\test"
$cvs="d:\test"
%name=lancelot
etc.
[download]

It's a bit of a mess, with some lines using quotes and others not. I wrote a short script that seems to work fine:

   
   open FILE, "anyfile.ini"||die "file open failed\n";
   my %inihash=();
   while (my $line = <FILE>) {
          $line =~ tr/"//d;
             (my $key, my $value)=split(/=/,$line);
               $inihash{$key}=$value;
    };
   print "$inihash{'$xmldir'}";
   print "$inihash{'$cvs'}";
   print "$inihash{'%name'}";
[download]

But, there must be a more efficient way of doing this, possibly using Config::IniFiles or some other code improvements. I'm open to any ideas that my fellow monks could suggest (comments, criticisms, etc.) Thanks in advance.

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Re: Reading .ini files by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Nov 25, 2002 at 16:27 UTC
Config::IniFiles would be my choice. It's easy to use especially when you tie it to a hash. `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Config::IniFiles; my %ini; tie %ini, 'Config::IniFiles', ( -file => "anyfile.ini" ); # Parameters are accessible like this: $ini{Section}{Parameter} foreach my $section ( keys %ini ) { my @parameters = keys %{$ini{$section}}; # do something with the @parameters for this $section }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Reading .ini files by Wonko the sane (Curate) on Nov 25, 2002 at 16:35 UTC
Config::IniFiles would definitely be my first choice for doing this effectively in production code. Here is a map and regex solution to the same problem though. `#!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use Data::Dumper; my %info = map { /^(\S+)\s=\s"?(.+?)"?$/ } <DATA>; print Dumper( \%info ); __DATA__ key1="value1" key2=value2 key3 = value3 key4 =value4 key5 = "value5"` [download] Wonko	[reply] [d/l]