# Rule File Filter

Libwww provides a BEFORE filter for handling configuration files (a.k.a. rule files). Rule files can be used to initialize as much as the application desires including setting up new protocol modules etc. Also the rules file do not have to be a file - it can be a database or any other way of storage information. The syntax of the rule files is described in the rule file syntax section of this manual.

Parsing a rule file is done using a converter stream. This means that a rule file can come from anywhere, even across the network. We have defined a special content type for rule files called `WWW_RULES` in HTFormat. In some situations, a set of rules comes from a subset of a file or some other origin, for example INI files for X resources. In that case, you can also parse a single line from a rules file.

Constructors, Destructors and Methods