A new version of the Python config module has been released. What Does It Do? ================ The config module allows you to implement a hierarchical configuration scheme with support for mappings and sequences, cross-references between one part of the configuration and another, the ability to flexibly access real Python objects, facilities for configurations to include and cross-reference one another, simple expression evaluation and the ability to change, save, cascade and merge configurations. You can easily integrate with command line options using optparse. This module has been developed on python 2.3 but should work on version 2.2 or greater. A test suite using unittest is included in the distribution. A very simple configuration file (simple.cfg): # starts here message: Hello, world! #ends here a very simple program to use it: from config import Config cfg = Config(file('simple.cfg')) print cfg.message results in: Hello, world! Configuration files are key-value pairs, but the values can be containers that contain further values. A simple example - with the example configuration file: messages: [ { stream : `sys.stderr` message: 'Welcome' name: 'Harry' } { stream : `sys.stdout` message: 'Welkom' name: 'Ruud' } { stream : $messages[0].stream message: 'Bienvenue' name: Yves } ] a program to read the configuration would be: from config import Config f = file('simple.cfg') cfg = Config(f) for m in cfg.messages: s = '%s, %s' % (m.message, m.name) try: print >> m.stream, s except IOError, e: print e which, when run, would yield the console output: Welcome, Harry Welkom, Ruud Bienvenue, Yves The above example just scratches the surface. There's more information about this module available at http://www.red-dove.com/python_config.html Comprehensive API documentation is available at http://www.red-dove.com/config/index.html As always, your feedback is most welcome (especially bug reports, patches and suggestions for improvement). Enjoy! Cheers Vinay Sajip Red Dove Consultants Ltd. Changes since the last release posted on comp.lang.python: ========================================================== Made classes derive from object (previously they were old-style classes). Changed ConfigMerger to use a more flexible merge strategy. Multiline strings (using """ or ''') are now supported. A typo involving raising a ConfigError was fixed. Added ConfigOutputStream to provide better Unicode output support. Altered save code to put platform-dependent newlines for Unicode.