This program was written and tested in about six man-hours (I wasn't
fully focused, admittedly, so with all the stops included, it was closer
to nine). Its sole purpose is to read in an INI file and turn it into
valid JSON. It can either read the stream or a file. It is pipe-aware
and outputs to the standard console stream (see section USAGE for more
details).
The popular 2D game, Terraria, has a very active modding community. So when I heard that the makers of tConfig were scrapping their old code in favor of something more modern, I was thrilled that they were going to be using JSON instead of the (very dated, yet still reliable enough, for some) INI file format.
However, someone in the community complained, and I felt compelled to make this little program to show them just how easily an INI file can be converted, and with the hope that they'll use it as a starting place only, as the best JSON is the hand-checked, machine-validated JSON, in my opinion.
ini2json only relies on ANSI standard libraries. As a result, on my
particular Mac, I got it to build with g++ and
clang++ without errors. It should be as cross-compatible as
possible, not even forcing using namespace std; on your code, should
you choose to take the parser to use in your own stuff.
So, on to building:
clang++ ini2json.cpp -o ini2json
or g++, or hopefully ANY C++ compiler. Uses Linux endings, tested on a Mac OS X 10.6.8.
Once the program is built, it's easy to use the program in a variety of
ways. Using the supplied example test.ini:
cat test.ini | ./ini2json > test.json
./ini2json test.ini > test.json
Or, to enter it manually, just run ini2json with no parameters.
To install in a UNIX environment, you can install via /usr/bin/install -C ./ini2json /usr/local/bin, assuming that folder is in your $PATH.
On Windows, check your %PATH% variable for a good place to install it,
or, if in a Cygwin/MinGW environment, see the above statement for UNIX.