kvsections

Read and write files made of named sections holding KEY=VALUE pairs.

HEADER      VERSION=1 FORMAT=TEXT CREATED=20240101 REVISION=003 AUTHOR=EXAMPLE
            OWNER=NOBODY
CONFIG      NAME=DEFAULT MODE=NORMAL LEVEL=2 ENABLED=YES TIMEOUT=30 RETRIES=3
            BUFFER=4096 VERBOSE=NO
SCHEDULE    START=080000 STOP=173000 INTERVAL=15 DAYS=MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI
COMMENTS    Free text, which may run onto
            as many lines as it needs.

The format

• A file is a sequence of records, conventionally 80 columns wide and padded with spaces. Any of CRLF, LF or CR terminates a record on input; the writer emits LF unless told otherwise.
• A record that starts in column 1 begins a section; its first token is the section name. A record that starts with whitespace continues the section above it.
• The rest of a record holds space-separated KEY=VALUE pairs. A pair never spans records. Values contain no spaces; lists are written as comma-separated values.
• Section names and keys are upper-case. Each section name appears once per file and each key once per section.
• A section may hold free text instead of pairs, conventionally COMMENTS; a schema declares which ones. The text starts at its first non-blank character: leading whitespace on the first line, blank lines at either end and trailing spaces are layout, not content, and are not preserved.

Usage

import kvsections
from kvsections import Document, SectionField, TextSection


class Doc(Document):
    comments = SectionField(TextSection, "COMMENTS")  # free text, not pairs


doc = Doc.read("tests/samples/golden.txt")

doc["CONFIG"]["BUFFER"]  # '4096'  (values are strings)
doc["SOURCE"]["SIZE"]  # '001024' (leading zeros are kept)
doc["OPTIONS"]["FLAGS"]  # 'A,B,C,D' (lists stay strings here)
list(doc)  # ['HEADER', 'CONFIG', 'SOURCE', ...]
doc["COMMENTS"].text  # 'This is a freeform comment section.'

doc["CONFIG"]["BUFFER"] = "8192"
doc["OPTIONS"]["FLAGS"] = ["A", "B"]  # a list is joined with commas
doc["CONFIG"]["VERBOSE"] = None  # assigning None removes a key
kvsections.write(doc, "out.txt")

kvsections.read does the same with the generic Document, which reads every section, COMMENTS included, as key/value pairs; free text is something a schema declares. Document and Section are mutable mappings, so in, get, items, del and friends all work. Keys and section names are normalised to upper case on the way in, and lookups are case-insensitive. Values are always strings, commas included; splitting them into lists is the job of typed fields (below). loads/dumps work on strings and load/dump on open files.

Reading is tolerant

The reader never rejects a file. Anything it had to guess about is listed in doc.warnings as (lineno, message) pairs:

doc = kvsections.loads("header owner=nobody\nheader x=1")
for warning in doc.warnings:
    print(warning)
# line 1: section name 'header' is not upper-case; normalized
# line 1: key 'owner' is not upper-case; normalized
# line 2: section name 'header' is not upper-case; normalized
# line 2: duplicate section HEADER; merged into the earlier one
# line 2: key 'x' is not upper-case; normalized

Line length, padding and line endings are not checked, and the layout is inferred rather than assumed, so any indent width reads correctly, and a UTF-8 byte order mark is dropped with a warning, as is any character that could not be written back, such as the replacement character an undecodable byte becomes. Pass strict=True to raise ParseError at the first problem instead.

Writing is strict

dumps/write raise ValueError for anything that would not read back: lower-case or empty names and keys, whitespace or non-ASCII characters in values, or a section of the wrong kind for its name, such as pairs under COMMENT. Record width is a convention rather than a limit: a pair or word that cannot fit is written on a record of its own, longer than width.

Layout options, all keyword-only:

option	default	meaning
width	80	padded record length; None disables padding and wrapping
margin	1	columns left blank at the end of every record
indent	None	column where content starts; default is longest name plus one
newline	"\n"	record terminator; pass "\r\n" for consumers that need CRLF

Pairs that would cross width - margin wrap onto an indented continuation record. Long free-text lines are word-wrapped. With the defaults the sample file is written with an 11-column indent, because its longest section name is PARAMETERS; indent=12, newline="\r\n" reproduces the file byte for byte.

dump takes a file opened in text or binary mode. A text file may be opened with a plain open(path, "w"): the records are written through the file's underlying buffer, so newline translation never alters the terminators.

Fixing layout without parsing

wrap_records takes the text of a file whose records are too long and re-flows only those records onto continuation records, leaving every other byte as it was. It does not parse, so names, keys, values, spelling and order are untouched, and it never raises for content. Pass pad=True to also pad every record to width.

from kvsections import wrap_records

text = path.read_text(newline="")
path.write_text(wrap_records(text, width=80, pad=True), newline="")

reorder_records moves whole sections into a prescribed order the same way: a block starts at each header record, the order has the same form as for Document.reorder (see below), and every byte inside a block is kept. Pass a schema class as document_type to resolve aliases.

from kvsections import reorder_records

moved = reorder_records(
    text, ["HEADER", ..., "COMMENTS"], document_type=ExampleDocument
)

Typed documents

For a known file layout, describe the sections you care about and get typed attributes instead of strings:

from kvsections import Document, Section, TextSection, Field, SectionField
from kvsections.converters import HHMMSS, YYYYMMDD, zero_padded


class HeaderSection(Section):
    section_name = "HEADER"
    version = Field("VERSION", int)
    created = Field("CREATED", YYYYMMDD)  # datetime.date
    revision = Field("REVISION", zero_padded(3))  # keeps the leading zeros
    author = Field("AUTHOR")
    owner = Field("OWNER", default="NOBODY")


class ScheduleSection(Section):
    section_name = "SCHEDULE"
    interval = Field("INTERVAL", int)
    start = Field("START", HHMMSS)  # datetime.time
    days = Field("DAYS", list[str])


class ExampleDocument(Document):
    header = SectionField(HeaderSection)
    schedule = SectionField(ScheduleSection)
    comments = SectionField(TextSection, "COMMENTS", aliases=("COMMENT",))


doc = ExampleDocument.read("tests/samples/golden.txt")
doc.header.version  # 1
doc.schedule.days  # ['MON', 'TUE', 'WED', 'THU', 'FRI']
doc["CONFIG"]["BUFFER"]  # sections you did not describe stay generic

new = ExampleDocument()
new.header = {}  # sections are created explicitly; reading never creates
new.header.version = 7
new.header.revision = 12  # written as REVISION=012
new.comments = "Built in code."
new.write("new.txt")

• Field(key, type) is shorthand for parse=type, format=str. Pass parse and format explicitly when the text form matters, or pass a Converter, which bundles both and can also be used inside list[...].
• Reading a missing key raises AttributeError unless default is given, and so does reading a declared section the document lacks. Assigning None removes the key or the section.
• Field(key, list[T]) splits the value on commas, converts each item with T, and joins on assignment; parse and format then apply per item. An empty value is an empty list. The list is a copy, so assign a new list rather than appending to the old one.
• Declaring a SectionField registers its class for that name, so the reader instantiates it and a generic Section added under that name is converted. Registrations are inherited by subclasses, including through multiple inheritance.
• aliases gives a section alternative spellings. With the declaration above, a file may say either COMMENTS or COMMENT: doc.comments, doc["COMMENTS"] and doc["COMMENT"] all find it, list(doc) reports the canonical name, and the section keeps the spelling it was read with so a rewrite preserves it. A file containing both spellings is treated as a duplicate and merged with a warning. Aliases can also be declared as a section_aliases table on the class; subclasses inherit and extend them. The generic Document has no aliases, so for it COMMENT and COMMENTS are two different sections.
• The generic Document reads every section as pairs. A schema declares free-text sections with SectionField(TextSection, "COMMENTS"), as ExampleDocument does above.

Section order

The format itself imposes no order, but some files expect one. reorder puts the sections into a prescribed order in place. Names are listed in the wanted order, ... stands for every section not named (kept in their current relative order), and names after ... go last:

doc = kvsections.read("tests/samples/golden.txt")
doc.reorder(["OUTPUT", "HEADER", ..., "COMMENTS"])
list(doc)  # ['OUTPUT', 'HEADER', 'CONFIG', 'SOURCE', ..., 'COMMENTS']

Names absent from the document are ignored, aliases resolve, and without ... the unnamed sections follow the named ones. A schema can declare the order once as section_order, after which doc.reorder() needs no argument:

class ExampleDocument(Document):
    section_order = ["HEADER", "SCHEDULE", ..., "COMMENTS"]

reorder works on a parsed document, so a read, reorder, write sequence normalizes the layout as well. To move sections and change nothing else, use reorder_records from the layout helpers above.

Ready-made converters

kvsections.converters bundles parse/format pairs for encodings this format tends to use. Each validates in both directions and raises ValueError for text or values it cannot handle.

converter	text	Python value
YYMMDD, YYYYMMDD	240101, 20240101	datetime.date; %y follows Python's rule, 69 to 99 being 19xx
HHMMSS, HHMM	080000, 0800	datetime.time
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS	20240101080000	datetime.datetime
date_format(fmt), time_format(fmt), datetime_format(fmt)	any strftime pattern	as above
zero_padded(width)	003	non-negative int; digits only
YES_NO, Y_N, ON_OFF, TRUE_FALSE, flag(true, false)	YES	bool; writing also accepts the two words
one_of("A", "B")	A	str, restricted to the choices
enum_by_value(E), enum_by_name(E)	the member's value or name	member of E

The date and time converters also refuse values that would not read back, such as a year outside 1969 to 2068 for YYMMDD or a time with microseconds for HHMMSS.

A custom pair is one line: Converter(parse, format).

Development

uv run --group dev pytest
uv run --group dev pytest --cov      # branch coverage; fails below 95%
uv run --group dev ruff check
uv run --group dev ruff format --check
uv run --group dev mypy               # strict type checking

Tests are split by module under tests/, with shared fixtures in tests/helpers.py. Every tests/samples/*.txt file is picked up automatically and must parse without raising, round-trip through the model, and survive the layout helpers unchanged in content; a sample whose name starts with golden must also be reproduced byte for byte from its detected layout. Drop a file into the directory to add it to the suite.

CI runs the same four commands on every push and pull request, across Linux, Windows and macOS on Python 3.9 to 3.13, and builds the wheel.

Releasing

Releases publish to PyPI from GitHub Actions through trusted publishing, so no API token is stored. The version is derived from the git tag by hatch-vcs, so nothing in the repository needs bumping. To cut one:

git tag v0.2.0 && git push --tags

Untagged commits build as development versions such as 0.2.1.dev3+g1a2b3c4.