On Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 03:00:06PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

I guess the holy grail would be a parser which reports _all_ syntactic
events (section names, keys, comments, whitespace, etc) as a stream
without storing anything. And then the normal reader could just discard
the non-key events, and the writer here could build the tree from those
events.

I already changed the do_config_from_file()/do_config_from() code path to
allow for handing back section headers. And I *think* that approach should
be easily extended to allow for an optional callback for these syntactic
events (and we do not need more than that, as the parsed "tree" really is
a list: there is nothing nested about ini files, so we really only have a
linear list of blocks (event type, offset range)).

True. I was thinking we'd want sections with keys, whitespace, and
comments under them. But even that does not really make sense. As this
patch series shows, comments do not "belong" to a section, and the file
really needs to be considered as a stream.

So yeah, if we can parse it into a sequence of events in one
forward-pass and then manipulate that sequence, I think it should be
sufficient (and _way_ more readable than the current code, even before
the bits you are trying to fix here).

I'll think about this a little bit, and hopefully come back with v2 in a
while that uses that approach.

Thank you so much for that suggestion,

Great. Thanks for working on this.

-Peff