Need a Tcl library to read/write configuration files - tcl

Question

My Tcl application should read and store a lot of configurations parameters. I'd like to use regular disk file as a storage rather than registry or something else.
It would be great to store parameters hierarchically. All my parameters are strings, numbers, and lists of them. Configuration file(s) may be placed in directory (not only user's home). Normally application expects configuration file in the current directory.
Do you know any ready-to-use Tcl library?
More general question: what is the "Tcl-way" to read/write application configuration?
Thanks.

Answer 1

If the configuration does not necessarily need to be human-readable, I suggest you consider Sqlite -- it began as a Tcl extension, and therefore Tcl's Sqlite bindings are more mature than any other language's.
See: http://www.sqlite.org/tclsqlite.html

Answer 2

If you don't need random access (that is, configuration files are not huge and each can be slurped completely at once) and don't require processing by external tools, you could just use flat text files containing, say, Tcl lists. The "trick" is that in Tcl each value must have a valid string representation (when asked) and can be reconstructed from its string representation. You get that for free, that is, no special package is required and all you have to provide is some sort of structure to bind serialized values to their names.
To demonstrate:
set a "a string"
set b 536
set c {this is a list {with sublist}}
proc cf_write {fname args} {
set fd [open $fname w]
chan config $fd -encoding utf-8
set data [list]
foreach varName $args {
upvar 1 $varName var
lappend data [list $varName $var]
}
puts $fd $data
close $fd
}
proc cf_read fname {
set fd [open $fname]
chan config $fd -encoding utf-8
set data [read $fd]
close $fd
set data
}
set cfile [file join [file dir [info script]] conf.txt]
cf_write $cfile a b c
foreach entry [cf_read $cfile] {
lassign $entry name value
puts "$name: $value"
}
You'll get this output:
a: a string
b: 536
c: this is a list {with sublist}
Now if you feel like having something more fancy or "interoperable", look at YAML or JSON (you'll need to write a serializer for this one though) or INI formats--all available from Tcllib and hence are plain Tcl.
Even more fancier could be using XML via TDOM (an expat-based C extension). SQLite, which has been already proposed, is even more capable than that (provides random access to the data, is able to operate on huge data arrays). But it seems that for your task these tools appear to be too heavy-weight.
Note that my example deliberately opts to show how to store/restore an arbitrary ad-hoc list of variables so the cf_write procedure builds the Tcl list to be stored by itself. Of course, no one prevents you from building one yourself, providing for creation of hierarchical structures of arbitrary complexity. One caveat is that in this case you might (or might not) face a problem of deconstructing the restored list. But if you'll stick to a general rule of each element being a name/value pair as in my example, the deconstruction shouldn't be hard.

Answer 3

tcllib contains a package inifile for handling windows .ini file format configuration files. As it's part of tcllib it should be avaialble on all platforms (I've just checked and it loads ok on my Solaris 8 box). It allows you to both read and write .ini files and access the configuration by section and key.