Courses and course formats

Hi,
I want to be able to use variables to make a filter (for instance). It has to depend on the course but not on the whole collections of courses that I have in my moodle.

It would be great to have a file like

variable1="name1";
variable2="name2";
variable3="name3";

or something like that in every course, to be able to parser it and use the variables.

There is anyone that know a method to do that?
Thanks in advance.
Abel.