Zend_Config_Ini and a string

One thing that is different between Zend_Config_Xml and Zend_Config_Ini is that with Zend_Config_Xml you can pass in an XML string as the first parameter of the constructor and it will work. This doesn’t work with Zend_Config_Ini as we use parse_ini_file() under the hood.

With PHP 5.3 however there is is a new function called parse_ini_string() which will allow us to load arbitrary ini string into Zend_Config objects. This can’t go into Zend Framework 1 though due to our PHP 5.2.4 minimum version requirement.

As I needed this for a project, I extended Zend_Config_Ini to support this feature, which means simply overloading a single method

class App_Config_Ini extends Zend_Config_Ini
{
/**
* Load the INI file from disk using parse_ini_file(). Use a private error
* handler to convert any loading errors into a Zend_Config_Exception
*
* @param string $filename
* @throws Zend_Config_Exception
* @return array
*/
protected function _parseIniFile($filename)
{
set_error_handler(array($this, '_loadFileErrorHandler'));
if (substr($filename, -4) == '.ini') {
$iniArray = parse_ini_file($filename, true);
} else {
$iniArray = parse_ini_string($filename, true);
}
restore_error_handler();

// Check if there was a error while loading file
if ($this->_loadFileErrorStr !== null) {
/**
* @see Zend_Config_Exception
*/
require_once 'Zend/Config/Exception.php';
throw new Zend_Config_Exception($this->_loadFileErrorStr);
}

return $iniArray;
}
}

The actual change is to see if the last 4 characters of the filename are “.ini” and if they aren’t then use parse_ini_string() instead of parse_ini_file(). The rest of the code is just error handling.

This is one area where I really like it when a class implements methods that done just one thing.