lightweight human-readable config?

[Corey Coughlin]

I actually have a whole set of programs that use a format like this,
it's actually parsed on spaces and keywords, so you just say:

keyword1 value1 value2 value3

keyword2 value1 

keyword3
value1
value2

and so on.  It's pretty free format, and relatively easy to parse, all
you need to set up is a list of keywords, and in return from these
functions you get a dictionary with the value lists for each keyword.
You can also add comments by adding '#' signs, and the rest of the
line is a comment. Here are the functions:

def ParseCommandFile(commfn, commkeys):
    commwords = ReadCommandFile(commfn)
    return ParseList(commwords, commkeys)

def ReadCommandFile(commfn):
    if not (commfn and os.path.exists(commfn):
        raise OSError, "Can't find this path: %s" % fname
    commf = open(commfn,'r')
    commtext = ''
    for line in commf:
        if '#' in line:
            line = line[:string.find(line,'#')]
        commtext = commtext + ' ' + line
    commf.close()
    commwords = string.split(commtext)
    return commwords

def ParseList(commlist, commkeys):
    commvals = {}
    for ck in commkeys:
        commvals[ck] = []
    currkey = ''
    currval = []
    foundkeys = commkeys[:]
    for cword in commlist:
        if currkey:
            if cword in foundkeys:
                commvals[currkey] = currval
                currkey = cword
                foundkeys.remove(currkey)
                currval = []
            else:
                currval.append(cword)
        else:
            if cword in foundkeys:
                currkey = cword
                foundkeys.remove(currkey)
    if currkey:
        commvals[currkey] = currval
    return commvals

There it is, maybe not the most efficient code, but it lets you write
a command file parsed on spaces, so there's no need to worry about
extra syntax characters, which keeps it nice and clean.

Maxim Khesin <max at cNvOiSsiPoAnMtech.com> wrote in message news:<p4Xnb.17367$Gq.5475490 at twister.nyc.rr.com>...
> I want to have a config file with my python proggie, satisfying the 
> following requirements:
> 1) support key->(value, default)
> 2) simple and intuitive to read and edit
> 3) easyly readable into a python datastructure (a dictionary?)
> 4) not requiring any heavy libraries needed (I am distributing my 
> proggie as a py2exe executable and do not want to bloat the size)
> 
> can you guys suggest some format for this? thanks,
> max