Question

I have a small application that I’m developing, that I may want to give/sell to others. I want to persist some settings, and create an admin interface to modify them. What would be the best way to store them away? A DB table seems like overkill for the 10-20 settings I’ll have, and I want the retrieval of these settings to be as fast as possible. Is a flat file another viable option? What are the pitfalls associated with using a flat file? What would be the fastest/easiest way to interface with a flat file storing multiple keys and values?

Answer 1

I often use PHP’s parse_ini_file for this.

So if you write an .ini file with this:

; This is a sample configuration file ; Comments start with ';', as in php.ini  [first_section] one = 1 five = 5 animal = BIRD  [second_section] path = "/usr/local/bin" URL = "http://www.example.com/~username"  [third_section] phpversion[] = "5.0" phpversion[] = "5.1" phpversion[] = "5.2" phpversion[] = "5.3" 

And read it in with this PHP code:

define('BIRD', 'Dodo bird'); $ini_array = parse_ini_file("sample.ini", true); print_r($ini_array); 

You will get this output:

Array (     [first_section] => Array         (             [one] => 1             [five] => 5             [animal] => Dodo bird         )      [second_section] => Array         (             [path] => /usr/local/bin             [URL] => http://www.example.com/~username         )      [third_section] => Array         (             [phpversion] => Array                 (                     [0] => 5.0                     [1] => 5.1                     [2] => 5.2                     [3] => 5.3                 )          )  )