The parsing capabilities of libcfg+ are accessed through a
context, which is defined by the
CFG_CONTEXT
structure. By using contexts, one can
parse several configuration files and the command line at the same time.
The functions used for creating a new context are described below. Those used for freeing (destroying) a context are described at the end of this page.
#include <cfg+.h>
CFG_CONTEXT cfg_get_context
(struct cfg_option *options);
CFG_CONTEXT cfg_get_cmdline_context
(long begin_pos, long size, char **argv, struct cfg_option options);
CFG_CONTEXT cfg_get_cfgfile_context
(long begin_pos, long size, char *filename, struct cfg_option options);
void cfg_set_cmdline_context
(CFG_CONTEXT con, long begin_pos, long size, char **argv);
void cfg_set_cfgfile_context
(CFG_CONTEXT con, long begin_pos, long size, char *filename);
The function cfg_get_context()
initializes a context but
does not associate it with either the command line or a file. It takes a
pointer to the option set *options
and returns a new
context. The association with the command line or a file can be done with
cfg_set_cmdline_context()
and
cfg_set_cfgline_context()
respectively.
The function cfg_get_cmdline_context()
is used for full
context initialization, which includes the initialization itself and assigning
the newly created context to the command line. The
begin_pos
parameter stores the starting parsing
position in the array of command line arguments. The
size
parameter defines the number of arguments (array
elements) to parse. If a negative value is passed, the parsing will stop only
when an NULL
is encountered. The
argv
parameter is a pointer to a
NULL
terminated array of strings (options + arguments) to
be parsed. As most of you probably know, argv
is the
second parameter passed to the main()
function.
The function cfg_get_cfgfile_function()
initializes a new
context and associates it with a configuration file. The parameter
begin_pos
determines the file offset at which the
parsing will start. Whether the offset is expressed in bytes or lines depends
on the value of the context flag CFG_FILE_LINE_POS_USAGE
.
If the flag is unset (the default value), begin_pos
should be interpreted as a byte offset. If the flag is set,
begin_pos
is a line offset. See the Context flags section for
more information about this. Whatever the case, the offset is zero based. The
size
parameter defines the number of bytes or lines to
parse. If the value is negative, the file will be parsed in its entirety. The
name of the file to parse is passed in filename
.
cfg_set_cmdline_context()
and
cfg_set_cfgfile_context()
work on an already existing
context. These functions accept the existing context in their first parameter.
The rest of their arguments are the same as those of
cfg_get_cfgfile_function()
and
cfg_get_cmdline_context()
. Note that the two sets of
functions differ in their return values. The context setting functions return
void while the context creating functions return a new context. Working with
existing contexts may be more convenient than creating new contexts from
scratch, especially when there is a need to switch from parsing a file to
parsing the command line and vice versa.
Note, that while begin_pos
of the file context defines
the starting parsing offset in a file, the same parameter for the command line
context specifies the offset in the argv
array. Note
also that all offsets are zero-based. For example, the third line of a file is
at offset 2
. However, the error handling
routines of libcfg+ increment all offsets by one when reporting an error, thus
human readable messages are returned. So for the first position on command
line it will print something like
on position 1, for second line in
configuration file it will print
on line 2 and so on.
Starting from version 0.5.2, the
cfg_get_cmdline_context_argc()
and
cfg_set_cmdline_context_argc()
functions became
available. It creates a new context by passing the
argc
and argv
parameters
directly from main()
function. Its parameters are similar
to those of cfg_get_cmdline_context()
, but instead of
begin_pos
and size
, only
argc
is present. Whether one is more convenient than
the other depends on the circumstances and it is for you to decide which one
suits you best.
There are also two groups of macros for managing contexts. The first group
includes cfg_get_cmdline_context_pos()
and
cfg_get_cfgfile_context_pos()
and is used for creating a
new context of the needed type. You can use the second group, which consist of
cfg_set_cmdline_context_pos()
and
cfg_set_cfgfile_context_pos()
, for manipulating an
existing context. The difference between these four macros and their function
counterparts is in the size
parameter, which is
replaced by end_pos
and specifies the offset of the
last element to be parsed. For a file context the value is the byte offset (or
line number) while for a command line context it is the offset in the
argv
array.
The following functions are used for reseting and freeing a context.
You may come across situations when a context reset is necessary. You can use
cfg_reset_context()
to perform this task. When this
function is called on a command line context, the offset in the
argv
is set to the value of
begin_pos
. For a file context, the offset is reset to
the value of begin_pos
. Context flags and context
properties remain unchanged after a call to
cfg_reset_context()
.
After you are done with a context, you should use
cfg_free_context()
to free the resources associated with
it. The function takes a context in its only parameter
con
. The function does not deallocate the memory for
any arguments or argument arrays you might have allocated in your option set.
You need to free that memory manually. However, it will free all internal
context structures, which includes the context flags, context properties, and
the context itself.