readKeyValueFile: Read a key-value file (KEY=VALUE) into a named list

In rpact: Confirmatory Adaptive Clinical Trial Design and Analysis

Read a key-value file (KEY=VALUE) into a named list

Description

Reads a human-editable key-value file in a widely used format (INI/.env-like): KEY=VALUE. Blank lines are ignored. Full-line comments starting with # or ; are ignored. Inline comments are supported for unquoted values when preceded by whitespace, e.g., KEY=123 # comment.

Usage

readKeyValueFile(
  filePath,
  ...,
  inferTypes = TRUE,
  duplicateKeys = c("error", "last", "first"),
  safeKeyCheck = FALSE
)

Arguments

filePath	Path to the key-value file.
...	Currently unused.
inferTypes	Logical; if TRUE, attempts to convert values to logical/integer/numeric and NA. If FALSE, returns character values.
duplicateKeys	How to handle duplicate keys: "error" (default), "last" (keep last occurrence), or "first" (keep first occurrence).
safeKeyCheck	Logical; if TRUE, checks that keys only contain allowed characters. Set to FALSE (default) to allow arbitrary keys, but be aware that this may lead to issues when reading the file back, as keys with special characters may not be parsed correctly.

Details

Values can be quoted with double quotes. Escape sequences \n, \r, \t, \\, and \" are supported.

UTF-8 handling: The file is read as UTF-8 and all character values are normalized to UTF-8 via enc2utf8().

Value

A named list with parsed values.

Examples

## Not run: 
keyValueList <- list(
    STUDY_NAME = "Trial A",
    MAX_PATIENTS = 150L,
    THRESHOLD = 0.075,
    NOTES = "First phase\nSecond phase"
)
filePath <- tempfile(fileext = ".txt")
writeKeyValueFile(
    keyValueList = keyValueList,
    filePath = filePath,
    writeHeader = TRUE,
    sortKeys = TRUE,
    overwrite = TRUE
)
readKeyValueFile(filePath)

## End(Not run)

rpact documentation built on March 4, 2026, 5:06 p.m.