On Wednesday, November 30, 2011, Robert Kern wrote:

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:09, Giovanni Plantageneto wrote:

...

Dear all, I have a simple question. I would like to have all the parameters of a model written in a configuration file (text), and I would like to have all the parameters in the file automatically defined inside a program. I find ConfigParser a bit low level, is there any function that automatically reads everything from a file?

You may want to give something like configobj a try.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/configobj

It builds on ConfigParser to read all of the parameters in and creates a hierarchical object will all of the parameters as attributes.

-- Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion

+1 on configobj. I use this module extensively for my simulation configuration. It can even do some validation of parameters and allows for saving of comments. Furthermore, it utilizes the dictionary idiom, which makes it very easy to work with, especially for passing kwargs to functions. Cheers! Ben Root

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:49 PM, Neal Becker wrote:

My suggestion is: don't.

It's easier to script runs if you read parameters from the command line. I recommend argparse.

I think setting parameters in a config file and setting them on the command line both have their merits. I like to combine ConfigObj with argparse; something like: #~~~ parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() <add arguments to parser here> cfg = configobj.ConfigObj("params_file.cfg") parser.set_defaults(**cfg.config) #~~~ Then call parser.parse_args, which will override parameters in the config file by specifying values on the command line. Cheers, -Tony