[Tutor] conventions for establishing and saving default values for variables

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:27:43 pm Pete O'Connell wrote:
> Hi I was wondering if anyone could give me some insight as to the
> best way to get and save variables from a user the first time a
> script is opened. For example if the script prompts something like
> "What is the path to the folder?" and the result is held in a
> variable called thePath, what is the best way to have that variable
> saved for all subsequent uses of the script by the same user.

Others have already mentioned ConfigParser. You should also check out 
plistlib, in the standard library since version 2.6.

Other alternatives include pickle, XML, JSON or YAML (although since 
YAML is not part of the standard library, you will need to download a 
package for it). On Windows you can write to the registry, although 
since I'm not a Windows user I don't know how. Or if your config is 
simple enough, you can just write your data to the file manually. But 
honestly, you can't get much simpler than ConfigParser or plistlib.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano