Comments in configuration files

[Tim Daneliuk]

Pierre Quentel wrote:

> Bonjour,
> 
> I am developing an application and I have a configuration file with a 
> lot of comments to help the application users understand what the 
> options mean
> 
> I would like it to be editable, through a web browser or a GUI 
> application. With ConfigParser I can read the configuration file and 
> edit the options, but when I write the result all the comments are lost
> 
> Are there modules that work on the same kind of ini files (for the needs 
> of my application, I prefer this format to XML or YAML) and don't remove 
> the comments ?
> 
> TIA,
> Pierre


The latest incarnation of 'tconfpy' I just released will get you close:

      http://www.tundraware.com/Software/tconfpy

This program can read a configuration either from memory (a list) or a file.
So you could:

1) Read the file into an in-memory list (including the comments).

2) Pass the list to the parser, which would return a populated symbol
    table.

3) Use your application to read the current values of the symbols from
    the symbol table.

4) Modify the values in the symbol table as desired.

5) Map the new values in the symbol table back into the original list where
    the values were set intitially (this is the part that would take some work).

6) Write the list back to disk.

Note that the semantics of feature of 'tconfpy' are substantially different
than 'ConfigParser', and the languages recognized by each are quite different
as well.  It is probably fair to say that 'tconfpy' recognizes a superset
of the language recognized by 'ConfigParser'.  But you have to be
careful because the semantics are somewhat different.



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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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