This doesn't necessarily have to go in the C# area, but that's the lang I'll be using. I'm getting ready to code an application which will require the saving of data. Now, I could create my own custom format, create a database using SQL (not what I want to do at all!), use XML, or use an already existing format (e.g. csv, tab-delimited, etc.) What do you use for saving data in a desktop application? Is there some standard that people use?

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Jeremy Miller
Content Farmer - Optimized Automated Blog Posting

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Here's the byte writer for C#:

Hopefully that helps!
I'm pretty sure that C# also has another type of writer that will let you write it line by line. You'd probably want to double check on that...

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Thanks. What I meant, though, was what format do you choose to store it in?

For example, if I were collecting website, username, and password, then I could store it like

or

or any other number of ways. Which do most of you store your data in for ease of access via C#?

Does that make more sense?

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Jeremy Miller
Content Farmer - Optimized Automated Blog Posting

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I'd personally like the first one better:

It's much easier to do data retrieval from this kind of file because you can always "tokenize" it at "," lol... (sorry, I always mentioned tokenizer on several of my posts. Tokenizer is one of my most favorite class.)

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XML is common, and INI files are still used too. Honestly, it doesn't matter which one you use since they're both text. If the language has a specific facility for reading and parsing XML, it may be faster than using an INI file, though a language may also have built-in support for reading and parsing an INI file too. You could also use a binary file format, where the lengths of the "records" are varied in length. For example, you could have the equivalent of the following to store usernames (thinking about it like a hex editor):
'd' 'u' 'm' 'm' 'y' 00
'F' 's' 't' 00

You could also store the length, eliminating the need to check for a null terminator and also allowing you to have more control because you would not be reading an unknown number of bytes until you hit a null terminator, which may in fact be absent if improperly coded. The downside to this method is that you would need to ensure that it is saved properly, which would most likely require a hex editor if you don't have one already.

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"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
-- Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of what is now known as C++
For more quotes by Bjarne Stroustrup, check out http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#really-say-that.

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I haven't used any XML reader before lol.. that's why I still prefer to read it by ASCII.. but I think I should try that out I think Java has XML parser or something like that. I can pretty much assume that C# also has it since they're both really similar.

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XML bothers me b/c it takes up so much space and offers little in return for data that doesn't need to be transferred between various applications while complicating the parsing of the data substantially. I think I'll go ahead and stick with a csv-like format, but stored in binary. I don't know much about the .ini file format.

Thanks for all the tips and feedback - very much appreciated!

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Jeremy Miller
Content Farmer - Optimized Automated Blog Posting

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I like using XML the most, i have used it a couple of times now, once you start getting your head round parsing it in your language of choice then you see its not really that hard to save, delete, create etc...

XML is also good if you want the user to be able to change the settings from that file, lets say there's an error in the application on load in a version where your error handling is not 100%, they can just change a setting in the XML file to make it all work again, rather than a reinstall or something like that.

Another good example is when you have different languages and the user is computer literate (Or has a user guide) and would like to change something in there language, say you have a button with the text "Exit" from the XML file, the user could change it to "Close" or something like that, which can be good as users like it when things are the way they want.

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I personally never have used XML in my lifetime, but I've just seen it. I probably should try the use of XML sometimes lol... I just seen it's being used as the feeder, that's all haha... *plus whatever you told me before about changing language*

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It's a fairly simple construct, actually. My second example above is in XML (minus the header declaration). The example above is fairly easy to parse using regular expressions. It gets complicated when you have recursive nesting.

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Jeremy Miller
Content Farmer - Optimized Automated Blog Posting

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