How to parse nagios status.dat file?

Question

I\'d like to parse status.dat file for nagios3 and output as xml with a python script. The xml part is the easy one but how do I go about parsing the file? Use multi line re

Answer 1

If you slightly tweak Andrea's solution you can use that code to parse both the status.dat as well as the objects.cache

def parseConf(source):
conf = []
for line in source.splitlines():
    line=line.strip()
    matchID = re.match(r"(?:\s*define)?\s*(\w+)\s+{", line)
    matchAttr = re.match(r"\s*(\w+)(?:=|\s+)(.*)", line)
    matchEndID = re.match(r"\s*}", line)
    if len(line) == 0 or line[0]=='#':
        pass
    elif matchID:
        identifier = matchID.group(1)
        cur = [identifier, {}]
    elif matchAttr:
        attribute = matchAttr.group(1)
        value = matchAttr.group(2).strip()
        cur[1][attribute] = value
    elif matchEndID and cur:
        conf.append(cur)
        del cur
return conf

It is a little puzzling why nagios chose to use two different formats for these files, but once you've parsed them both into some usable python objects you can do quite a bit of magic through the external command file.

If anybody has a solution for getting this into a a real xml dom that'd be awesome.