ConfigParser shootout, preliminary entry

[Paramjit Oberoi]

> Since then I've been playing around with this... not the parsing part (which
> so far I have completely ignored) but the programmer interface. There needs
> to be a well-thought-out data model for the information stored, and the user
> interface needs to be very easy to use, yet not so "magical" that it becomes
> difficult to understand.

>From the me-too department:

For me personally, the problems with ConfigParser were inconvenient value
access/update and lack of order-preservation by the INI parser/writer.  I
have developed my own solution which:

* Is convenient: both attribute access as well as container syntax can be
used to access as well as update values:

   from cfgparse.iniparser import ini_namespace
   conf = ini_namespace()
   conf.user.name = 'Oberoi'
   print conf['user']['name']
   'Oberoi'

* Preserves order/indentation/spacing when the INI file is updated and
when the data is accessed.

* I have given some thought to the data model and interface question, but
probably not as much as you.  The data model simply is that of arbitrarily
nested namespaces, each containing values (although each specific
implementation of the model can have it's own restrictions - for example,
INI files don't allow top-level values).  The abstract model/interface
allos conversion from one config format to another.

* I have some code written using the ConfigParser API which I didn't want
to have to update, so an API-compatible interface is also available which
implements the old interface, as well as allowing access to the new one.

The code can be found here:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~param/software/cfgparse/

-param