What is the best practice for reading a large number of custom settings from a text file?
- by jawilmont
So I have been looking through some code I wrote a few years ago for an economic simulation program. Each simulation has a large number of settings that can be saved to a file and later loaded back into the program to re-run the same/similar simulation. Some of the settings are optional or depend on what is being simulated.
The code to read back the parameters is basically one very large switch statement (with a few nested switch statements). I was wondering if there is a better way to handle this situation.
One line of the settings file might look like this:
#RA:1,MT:DiscriminatoryPriceKDoubleAuction,OF:Demo Output.csv,QM:100,NT:5000,KP:0.5 //continues...
And some of the code that would read that line:
switch( Character.toUpperCase( s.charAt(0) ) )
{
case 'R':
randSeed = Integer.valueOf( s.substring(3).trim() );
break;
case 'M':
marketType = s.substring(3).trim();
System.err.println("MarketType: " + marketType);
break;
case 'O':
outputFileName = s.substring(3).trim() ;
break;
case 'Q':
quantityOfMarkets = Integer.valueOf( s.substring(3).trim() );
break;
case 'N':
maxTradesPerRound = Integer.valueOf( s.substring(3).trim() );
break;
case 'K':
kParameter = Float.valueOf( s.substring(3).trim() );
break;
// continues...
}
