configparserenhanced 0.8.0a0

A tool that extends configparser to enable enhanced processing of .ini files.

ConfigParserEnhanced

ConfigParserEnhanced (CPE) provides extended functionality for the ConfigParser module. This class attempts to satisfy the following goals:

1. Provide a framework to embed extended ‘parsing’ into Config.ini style files with customizable handlers that allow 'commands' to be embedded into the key-value structure of typical .ini file options.
2. Enable chaining of [SECTIONS] within a single .ini file, which uses the parsing capability noted in (1).
3. Provide an extensible capability. We intend CPE to be used as a base class for other tools so that subclasses can add additional handlers for new ‘operations’ which can be used by the parser.

Configuration .ini File Enhancements

CPE allows .ini files to be augmented to embed commands into the key: value structure of options within a section.

Normal .ini files might have a structure that looks like this:

[SECTION NAME]
key1: value1
key2: value2
key4: value3

CPE augments this by allowing the keys to be used to embed operations. To enable this, CPE attempts to split a key into three pieces, an operation, a parameter, and an optional uniqueifier string. An option can have an operation extracted as <operation> <parameter> [uniquestr]: value for example:

[SECTION NAME]
operation1 parameter1: value1
operation2 parameter2 A: value2
operation2 parameter2 B: value2
key1: value1
key2: value2
key3: value3

Note: The [uniquestr] is optional and we can use it to prevent certain duplicate key errors from the underlying ConfigParser which requires that each section must have no duplicate 'key' fields.

When the CPE parser successfully identifies a potential operation, it will attempt to find a handler method named as _handler_<operation>() or handler_<operation>(), and if one exists then it will execute that handler with the detected parameter (if any) and value (if any) from that entry.

New handlers can be added by creating a subclass of CPE and then adding the new handlers to the subclass.

Operations

The CPE base class provides the following handlers by default.

use

The use handler is used in the following manner:

[SECTION-A]
key-A1: value-A1
key-A2: value-A2
key-A3: value-A3

[SECTION-B]
use SECTION-A
key-B1: value-B1

In this example, the entry use SECTION-A that is inside [SECTION-B] instructs the core parser to recurse into [SECTION-A] and process it before moving on with the rest of the entries in [SECTION-B]. In this example the following code could be used to parse SECTION-B. ConfigParserEnhanced.configparserenhanceddata['SECTION-B'] would return the following result:

>>> cpe = ConfigParserEnhanced(filename='config.ini')
>>> cpe.configparserenhanceddata['SECTION-B']
{
    'key-A1': 'value-A1',
    'key-A2': 'value-A2',
    'key-A3': 'value-A3',
    'key-B1': 'value-B1',
}

Updates

See the CHANGELOG for information on changes.

Links

Additional documentation can be found here.