[ViralBShah]

Settles three things before 0.6.0 is registered, since changing them afterwards would be breaking.

Multi-line values are opt-in

• New option multiline_values, false by default. When it is off, every line stands on its own and leading whitespace is ignored, as in 0.5. An indented line is a separate entry, or malformed if it has no = or :.
• With multiline_values=true, a line indented more than the line that started an entry continues its value, as before.
• With the option off, write throws an ArgumentError naming the key and section for a value that contains a newline, because it could not be read back. The check runs before anything is written, so write(filename, ini) leaves an existing file alone. REPL display, print, string and interpolation never throw. Only write checks.
• With multiline_values=true, a round trip keeps the lines of a value but not the whitespace around each line, trailing blank lines, or lines that start with # or ;. The docs now say so, and a test pins it down.
• The breaking change "a line indented more than the previous entry is now a continuation" is gone from the upgrade guide, because the default now matches 0.5.

merged(ini)

• Returns a new OrderedDict{String,String}: the defaults, then each section's keys in section order, with a later section overriding an earlier one. Each key keeps the position where it first appeared.
• Named merged rather than flatten, which would clash with Base.Iterators.flatten. merged is not defined in Base, Core or the standard libraries checked.
• Later sections win, in the order Circuitscape 4 walked the sections of Python's ConfigParser. I checked the repeated-section case against Python 3's configparser with strict=False. Python also lowercases keys, and Python 2 strips ; comments, so for Python files use lowercase_keys=true and inline_comment_prefixes=(";",) to get the same keys.

Repeated keys and sections

• Within a section, the last value wins and the key keeps its first position. This was already the behaviour; it is now documented and tested.
• A repeated section header adds to the earlier section, which keeps its position. Sections are ordered by their first header, so in merged a later section wins even over a line further down the file in a repeated, earlier section.
• Never an error, with or without strict. strict only concerns malformed lines, so Circuitscape can use strict=true and still override a key by appending a line. There is no option to reject duplicates; if one is added later, it should be separate from strict.

Docstrings (module, Inifile, read, write, set, merged) and the README are updated. The 0.6 upgrade guide lists write's new ArgumentError. The test suite grows from 247 to 292 tests, covering every combination of strict and multiline_values for repeated keys.

Review

An independent review found that print and string threw for multi-line values, that the docs overstated the multi-line round trip, and that the merged docstring overstated equivalence with Python. Those are fixed in ad7119f. Two suggestions are left out of this PR:

• Keys or section names containing newlines, = or : are still written out broken, as in 0.5. That could be a follow-up.
• Checking every value against all of the reader's rules, not just newlines, would make write throw for things like trailing spaces, which INI files normally drop.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 100.00%. Comparing base (39183d4) to head (ad7119f).
⚠️ Report is 3 commits behind head on master.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff            @@
##            master       #41   +/-   ##
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  Coverage   100.00%   100.00%           
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  Files            1         1           
  Lines          146       172   +26     
=========================================
+ Hits           146       172   +26     

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