Modern day, unicode-friendly ".ini file" to store config data in VB6

Question

I'd like to store the contents of a data structure, a few arrays, and a dozen or so variables in a file that can be saved and reloaded by my software as well as optionally edited in a text editor by a user reloaded. For the text editing, I need the data to be clearly labeled, like in a good ole .ini file:

AbsMaxVoltage = 17.5

There's a GUI, and one could argue that the user should just load and save and modify from the GUI, but the customer wants to be able to read and modify the data as text.

It's easy enough to write code to save it and reload it (assuming all the labels are in the same place and only the data has changed). With more work (or using some of the INI R/W code that's already out there I could pay attention to the label so if a line gets deleted or moved around the variables still get stuffed correctly, but both of these approaches seem pretty old-school. So I'm interested in how the brightest minds in programming would approach this today (using decade-old VB6 which I have to admit I still love).

Disclaimer: I'm an electrical engineer, not a programmer. This isn't my day job. Well maybe it's a few % of my day job.

Cheers!

Answer 1

Lots of people will recommend XML to you. The problem is XML is still so trendy, some people use it everywhere without really thinking about it.

Like Jeff Atwood said, it's hard for non-programmers to read XML and particularly to edit it. There are too many rules, like escaping special characters and closing the tags in the correct order. Some experts recommend you treat XML as a binary format, not a text format at all.

I recommend using INI files, provided the maximum size limit of 32K is not a problem. I've never reached that limit in many similar situations in my own VB6. INI files are easy for ordinary folk to edit, and it's easy to read and write them from VB6. Just use some of the excellent drop-in code freely available on the web.

• I'm sure the class Jay Riggs provided in his answer is excellent, because it's from VBAccelerator.
• I would also recommend this class, because anything by Karl Peterson will be excellent too.

A couple of other points to think about:

• Have you considered which directory to put the files into?
• You mentioned "Unicode-friendly" in the question. INI files aren't Unicode, but that doesn't matter in practise. Unless you want to store characters that aren't supported on the current code page - like Chinese on an English computer - an unusual requirement, and one that will cause you other problems in a VB6 program anyway.
• Legendary Windows guru Raymond Chen described the advantages of XML configuration files over INI files. Many of them rely on the XML file being read-only. The one legitimate advantage is if the data is highly structured - class heirarchies or the like. From your description that doesn't apply.