.ini files...

[Camzie]

Hi there

I need help!!!!

How do you read from an .ini file by using a java socket?????

Will appreciate it
Camzie

[travishein]

well, a socket has an input stream.
an input stream can be read with a reader.
a reader supports reading line-oriented things.

an ini file has two types of lines, the [header] in the square bracket thing, and the key=value kind of thing.

in an ideal case one would create a grammar, such as using ANTLR or jflex that produces tokens from scanning the input text, kind of like a regular expression.

in a pinch, I guess you could read a line from the reader that is wrapping the input stream from the socket and do simple "if line starts with [ " then consider it to be the start of a section, else if it starts with ";" or "#" or is empty, then consider it a comment or white space and then ignore it. otherwise read the line, split it on the "=", the stuff on the left hand side is the key name, the stuff on the right hand side is the value. Then take, this key/value, and stuff it into the contents for the current 'section'.

Conceptually, the data storage for an in-memory view of the contents of an .ini file might look like.

Map<String, Map<String, String>> iniFileContents;

Where the outer map stores the 'section' name, and the inner map stores each key-value entry within the map.

But, this kind of thing has already been figured out, back in 2004. See the posting on CodeProject site. CodeProject: An Enhanced INI File Class for Java. Free source code and programming help