An ini format parser and serializer for node.

A fork of npm/ini with adaptations to be more compatible with the Windows API ini functions.

Changes from the original library:

• encode
  • Array keys are written with indices, e.g. k[0], k[1], etc. instead of using k[] for all items.
  • safe for escaping values is greatly simplified. Newlines are replaced with spaces, no other characters are escaped, and quotes are added when needed.
• decode
  • Section lines can have leading and trailing spaces.
  • Lines starting with # aren't treated as comments.
  • Empty lines are ignored.
  • No special treatment for array keys.
  • All values are treated as strings (no special treatment for true, false and null).
  • unsafe for unescaping values is greatly simplified. No characters are unescaped, and comments aren't supported.

Sections are treated as nested objects. Items before the first heading are saved on the object directly.

Usage

Consider an ini-file config.ini that looks like this:

    ; this comment is being ignored
    scope = global

    [database]
    user = dbuser
    password = dbpassword
    database = use_this_database

    [paths.default]
    datadir = /var/lib/data

You can read, manipulate and write the ini-file like so:

    var fs = require('fs')
      , ini = require('ini')

    var config = ini.parse(fs.readFileSync('./config.ini', 'utf-8'))

    config.scope = 'local'
    config.database.database = 'use_another_database'
    config.paths.default.tmpdir = '/tmp'
    delete config.paths.default.datadir

    fs.writeFileSync('./config_modified.ini', ini.stringify(config, { section: 'section' }))

This will result in a file called config_modified.ini being written to the filesystem with the following content:

    [section]
    scope=local
    [section.database]
    user=dbuser
    password=dbpassword
    database=use_another_database
    [section.paths.default]
    tmpdir=/tmp

API

decode(inistring)

Decode the ini-style formatted inistring into a nested object.

parse(inistring)

Alias for decode(inistring)

encode(object, [options])

Encode the object object into an ini-style formatted string. If the optional parameter section is given, then all top-level properties of the object are put into this section and the section-string is prepended to all sub-sections, see the usage example above.

The options object may contain the following:

• section A string which will be the first section in the encoded ini data. Defaults to none.
• whitespace Boolean to specify whether to put whitespace around the = character. By default, whitespace is omitted, to be friendly to some persnickety old parsers that don't tolerate it well. But some find that it's more human-readable and pretty with the whitespace.

For backwards compatibility reasons, if a string options is passed in, then it is assumed to be the section value.

stringify(object, [options])

Alias for encode(object, [options])

safe(val)

Escapes the string val such that it is safe to be used as a key or value in an ini-file. Basically adds quotes if needed. For example

    ini.safe('"unsafe string"')

would result in

""unsafe string""

unsafe(val)

Unescapes the string val