Forums Scripts & Popups Using [ ] characters in an ini file

Normally when you look at an ini file through a text editor it looks something like


I'm trying to use an ini file to store some information for specific nicks, using the nick as the section.
For most nicks this isn't a problem, however, I recently noticed that a couple of the nicks have the [ ] characters in the nick, which is making it difficult to use the ini file format.

While I could use hash tables for this, I'm trying to reduce the number and size of the hash tables in use. This is being used on a bot, and currently the bot has 10 hash tables with between 20 and 10,000 entries (depending on the table).
The larger tables (ie: 5,000+ entries) could easily be transferred over to ini file format, as 99% of the information is just being stored.

Any suggestions as to how I could handle the [ ] characters in the respective nicks?

maybe try use  $chr(91) = [ and $chr(93) = ], don't know if it help, but you can try use $replace for this..

Albeit not pretty, I'd replace the square brackets with chars that "may" not be part of a nickname (e.g. round brackets) - and translate these chars back, if needed.
Unfortunately, you cannot use quotes or escapes, $encode won't help either. Of course, there may be networks that extended the "common" set of chars allowed for nicks ( letters, digits, []{}_-|^`\ )...

Just out of curiosity, did the [ and ] appear to be ~ when stored in an ini file? As in [~nick~]

As a matter of fact, yes.

Then what's the problem ? When you will use $readini(file,[nick],item) it will work.

weird.. it wasn't working, but now it is.. sorry for what has turned out to be an unnecessary question.

Uhm, but [ or ] == ~ and therefore ~nick~ = [nick] or [nick[ etc.
I supposed the issue was unambiguously translating a nick with square brackets to an ini section (or item), and vice versa

That was my thinking too, but (atm) mIRC is recognizing the difference between ~ for [ and ~ for ]

I don't understand it, but until it screws up or I can find a way to guarantee that this can't screw up, I'll just go with it.

or to put it another way.. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.