Ini files have been around for some time now and are very useful for storing small amounts of data, and I use them as an alternative to the registry. Years ago I found that they had been designed with a limit of 64k, however these days it is possible to store more than that. Recently I needed to store a fair bit more than ini files are intended for and after some research decided the way to use them.
There are 2 main classes for reading and writing to ini files TIniFile and TMemIniFile, but which one should you use?
Basically, I found out that TIniFile should be used to write to the file and TMemIniFile should be used to read from the file. A few people mentioned to me to just use the TMemIniFile and you should not use TIniFile, however I believe the TMemIniFile uses an internal hash table which causes writing to the file to be slow. So there it is, use TIniFile to write and TMemIniFile to read.
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