[Tutor] Re: Config Files

[Andrei]

Karthikesh Raju wrote on Wed, 7 Jul 2004 14:03:14 +0300:

> Thankx Andrei for your suggestion. i have now altered the config files
> as
> 
> [user]
> K = 8
> 
> [userless]
> K1 = 2
> 
> etc etc and loaded then using configParser module, and unpacked the
> dictionaries so now i will have two dictionaries user, userless with
> keys K and K1, but the keys are converted to lowercase, which i dont want,
> so a key like simulateK becomes simulatek.

Well, the ConfigParser is case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you ask
it for 'simulateK' or 'simulatek'. This is generally a good thing (I'm not
very fond of case sensitivity, not even in Python), but if you do need it,
it seems quite easy to implement.

> Why is this so? How do i solve it?

If you look at the source code of ConfigParser.py, you'll see that
ConfigParser inherits from RawConfigParser and RawConfigParser has a method
"optionxform" which converts a string to its lowercase equivalent. It's
called whenever you ask the config parser for an option. It's easy to get
around it by subclassing ConfigParser and overriding this one method:

>>> from ConfigParser import ConfigParser
>>> class CaseConfigParser(ConfigParser):
...     """A case sensitive configparser."""
...     def optionxform(self, optionstr):
...         # used to say: return optionstr.lower()
...         return optionstr
...     
>>> cp = CaseConfigParser()
>>> cp.add_section('section 1')
>>> cp.add_section('Section 1')
>>> cp.sections()
['section 1', 'Section 1']
>>> cp.set('section 1', 'first entry', '5')
>>> cp.set('Section 1', 'second entry', 'Abc')
>>> cp.set('Section 1', 'Second entry', 'deF')
>>> cp.get('Section 1', 'Second entry')
'deF'
>>> cp.get('Section 1', 'second entry')
'Abc'
 
> With regards to the the int problem i used string.atof in a try-except
> loop. Is this fine?

try-except is fine, string.atof is not really. You should avoid the string
module, it's deprecated. It's only useful if you need one of the constants
contained within. Use the built-in functions instead, like int() and
float() depending on whather you need integers or floating-point numbers.

-- 
Yours,

Andrei

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