Writing values to INI file

Question

I'm trying to store multiple data and then at the end go a head and push the data into the new .ini file. I found solutions which works but I want to get all the data first and then update the file at the end but the solutions i found updates the file straight away!

A solution I liked and worked is located: https://stackoverflow.com/a/36997282/6613233

I am trying to allow it gather information and then push it to the file at the end. My own attempt at this is below but i keep getting array array in my ini file.

Code:

$fbsettingsDB = parse_ini_file("location.ini", true);
$fbsettingsDB["id"]["value"] = $_POST['fbconfigid'];
$fbsettingsDB["location"]["value"] = $_POST['fbconfigcty'];
file_put_contents('location.ini', implode("\n", $fbsettingsDB));

The above is how I want to collect data. I have a bunch of code which goes in and out of statements, I want it to go ahead.. Assign the values required and at the very end go ahead and put the contents in the file like shown above.

Using the referred code i would then have to do:

config_set("location.ini", "id", "value", $_POST['fbconfigid']);
config_set("location.ini", "location", "value", $_POST['something']);
config_set("location.ini", "result", "value", $_POST['somethingelse']);

Which overwrites the file every time which in my opinion is just crazy! Overkill for my idea, there is obviously some way that can suit my needs so i can just call the function once after making a list of edit/changes and then when i call the function it grabs all my changed data and saves the file the way i want it!

Answer 1

I'll try to explain first why your code doesn't work, compared to the other.

Your inifile-array is build up of a nested array, $array[section][item] = value. The first dimension has the section names. The second dimension is the name of the items in the sections. So $fbsettingsDB["location"] contains an array of items, of which "value" is one.

Implode doesn't check if the array is nested. It just takes the first dimension (the sections) and tries to treat their values as a string. Since those values are actually arrays of items, PHP just converts that to the text 'array'.

Apart from that, you can't just implode the whole array. Section names should be enclosed in square brackets, so there is a little more work to do in that regard too.

If you check the solution in the answer you referred to, you'll see that it contains a loop which takes care of the first layer, the sections. The array of items of each section is converted separately with implode, which is then prefixed by the section name in square brackets, and the whole lot is appended to the end result.

So, your intention here: You don't want to set a value and write it back to file at once, but update multiple values and only write the end result to disk. Well, fortunately the function doesn't have to be atomic. It already performs three separate actions: loading from disk, modifying the data, and serializing it back to disk. Let's see if those can be isolated in separate functions:

Read the data. Well, hardly worth to make a function, but it may make your application somewhat more consistent if you use the same naming et cetera in a collection of related functions.

Note: I just wrote these from scratch. No PHP at hand to test, so they might contain minor syntactical errors.

So here it is:

// Loads ini file data
function config_read($config_file) {
    return parse_ini_file($config_file, true);
}

Setting the config in the loaded data. Again, hardly worth to have a function, but it adds readability and hides how exactly the ini file data is built up, so you don't have to worry about implementation details when using it. Note that the array is passed by reference. The array you specify is updated. The function doesn't return a value.

// Update a setting in loaded inifile data
function config_set(&$config_data, $section, $key, $value) {
    $config_data[$section][$key] = $value;
}

Then writing it:

// Serializes inifile config data back to disk.
function config_write($config_data, $config_file) {
    $new_content = '';
    foreach ($config_data as $section => $section_content) {
        $section_content = array_map(function($value, $key) {
            return "$key=$value";
        }, array_values($section_content), array_keys($section_content));
        $section_content = implode("\n", $section_content);
        $new_content .= "[$section]\n$section_content\n";
    }
    file_put_contents($config_file, $new_content);
}

Note that so far I didn't modify any of the code. I just wrapped it in separate functions. If you like, you could even call those functions in another function, so you still got the shorthand to write everything to disk at once. You'll have the original functionality, but without having duplicate code:

// Short-hand function for updating a single config value in a file.
function config_set_file($config_file, $section, $key, $value) {
    $config_data = config_read($config_file);
    config_set($config_data, $section, $key, $value)
    config_write($config_file, $section, $key, $value);
}

So, now you got this collection of functions, you can decide which to use based on the situation. If you just want to update a single value, you might as well write this:

config_set_file("location.ini", "id", "value", $_POST['fbconfigid']);

But if you have multiple configs to set, you can do this:

// Load
$config_data = config_read("location.ini");
// Set multiple values
config_set($config_data, "id", "value", $_POST['fbconfigid']);
config_set($config_data, "location", "value", $_POST['something']);
config_set($config_data, "result", "value", $_POST['somethingelse']);
// Save
config_write($config_data, $config_file);

I can imagine you can add other shorthands, like config_set_array_file, which you could call like this.. I'll leave the implementation of this one to you for exercise. ;)

array_config_set_file($config_file, array(
    "id" => $_POST['fbconfigid'],
    "location" => $_POST['something'],
    "result" => $_POST['somethingelse']));

And after that, you can poor all this into an IniFile class to make it even nicer. :)