Lists in ConfigParser

Question

The typical ConfigParser generated file looks like:

[Section]
bar=foo
[Section 2]
bar2= baz

Now, is there a way to index lists like, for in

Answer 1

import ConfigParser
import os

class Parser(object):
    """attributes may need additional manipulation"""
    def __init__(self, section):
        """section to retun all options on, formatted as an object
        transforms all comma-delimited options to lists
        comma-delimited lists with colons are transformed to dicts
        dicts will have values expressed as lists, no matter the length
        """
        c = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
        c.read(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'config.cfg'))

        self.section_name = section

        self.__dict__.update({k:v for k, v in c.items(section)})

        #transform all ',' into lists, all ':' into dicts
        for key, value in self.__dict__.items():
            if value.find(':') > 0:
                #dict
                vals = value.split(',')
                dicts = [{k:v} for k, v in [d.split(':') for d in vals]]
                merged = {}
                for d in dicts:
                    for k, v in d.items():
                        merged.setdefault(k, []).append(v)
                self.__dict__[key] = merged
            elif value.find(',') > 0:
                #list
                self.__dict__[key] = value.split(',')

So now my config.cfg file, which could look like this:

[server]
credentials=username:admin,password:$3

Can be parsed into fine-grained-enough objects for my small project.

>>> import config
>>> my_server = config.Parser('server')
>>> my_server.credentials
{'username': ['admin'], 'password', ['$3>> my_server.loggingdirs:
['/tmp/logs', '~/logs', '/var/lib/www/logs']
>>> my_server.timeoutwait
'15'

This is for very quick parsing of simple configs, you lose all ability to fetch ints, bools, and other types of output without either transforming the object returned from Parser, or re-doing the parsing job accomplished by the Parser class elsewhere.