Hello, Have you considered using something that is already developed?
You could take a look at this presentation for an overview of what's available: http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/5/ Anyway, let me explain that, since I "discovered" it, my favourite format for configuration files is yaml (http://yaml.org/, http://pyyaml.org/). It's easy to read, easy to write, available in different programming languagues, etc. In addition to this, type conversion is already in place so I think it covers your requirement. For example: IIn [1]: import yaml In [2]: yaml.load("""name: person name ...: age: 25 ...: is_programmer: true""") Out[2]: {'age': 25, 'is_programmer': True, 'name': 'person name'} Best regards, Javier 2009/7/2 Zach Hobesh <hob...@gmail.com>: > Hi all, > > I've written a function that reads a specifically formatted text file > and spits out a dictionary. Here's an example: > > config.txt: > > Destination = C:/Destination > Overwrite = True > > > Here's my function that takes 1 argument (text file) > > the_file = open(textfile,'r') > linelist = the_file.read().split('\n') > the_file.close() > configs = {} > for line in linelist: > try: > key,value = line.split('=') > key.strip() > value.strip() > key.lower() > value.lower() > configs[key] = value > > except ValueError: > break > > so I call this on my config file, and then I can refer back to any > config in my script like this: > > shutil.move(your_file,configs['destination']) > > which I like because it's very clear and readable. > > So this works great for simple text config files. Here's how I want > to improve it: > > I want to be able to look at the value and determine what type it > SHOULD be. Right now, configs['overwrite'] = 'true' (a string) when > it might be more useful as a boolean. Is there a quick way to do > this? I'd also like to able to read '1' as an in, '1.0' as a float, > etc... > > I remember once I saw a script that took a string and tried int(), > float() wrapped in a try except, but I was wondering if there was a > more direct way. > > Thanks in advance, > > Zach > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
