Question

I have a perl script that’s reading an INI file like this:

[placeholder_title]
Hostname = 127.0.0.1
Port = 161

The library that I’m using for this is Config::Tiny.

Normally when reading the ini file, I would have something like this:

$Config = Config::Tiny->read( 'configfile.ini' );

my $Hostname_property = $Config->{placeholder_title}->{Hostname};

Now I have a case where the section title in the config file is decided by the user, so I don’t exactly know what it is.

Before I actually had multiple sections in the config file, so I would iterate through them like this:

 foreach my $Section (keys %{$Config}) {

            my $Hostname_property = $Config->{$Section}->{Hostname};
            my $Port_property = $Config->{$Section}->{Port};

But what if I were to have only 1 section in total?

Is there a particular keyword I can use to substitute for the section name?

I’ve tried the similar looping logic from the prior example something like this:

$Config = Config::Tiny->read( 'configfile.ini' );

my $Section = keys %{$Config};

my $Hostname_property = $Config->{$Section}->{Hostname};

print $Hostname_property, "\n";

But then I get an error that $Hostname_property is not initialized, so my $Section variable clearly isn’t doing what I hoped it to do.

If anybody can help me out or at least point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The reason my $Section = keys %{$Config}; doesn’t work is that you’re calling keys in scalar context, so it’s returning the number of keys. Try calling it in list context instead:

my ($Section) = keys %{$Config};

This will set $Section to the first key. (“first” in whatever order keys is returning the keys in. If there’s only one key, that doesn’t matter.)