ConfigParser: what read('non-existent-filename') returns in 2.3.x?

[Danil Dotsenko]

Danil Dotsenko wrote:

> Chris Lambacher wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 10:50:40AM -0700, Danil Dotsenko wrote:
>>> Wrote a little "user-friedly" wrapper for ConfigParser for a KDE's
>>> SuperKaramba widget.
>>> (http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=32185)
>>> 
>>> I was using 2.4.x python docs as reference and
>>> ConfigParser.read('non-existent-filename') returns [] in 2.4.x
>> http://docs.python.org/lib/RawConfigParser-objects.html
>> That agrees with the docs since read returns a list of successfully
>> parsed
>> filenames.  Note the docs also say this was added in 2.4.
> 
> I just looked at the
> http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.5/lib/RawConfigParser-objects.html
> (note the version number) and see the following:
> "If none of the named files exist, the ConfigParser instance will contain
> an empty dataset." Which to me means []. To the least of it, the statement
> should be clarified, but I would still kindly prefer to have someone
> respond / confirm the procedure bellow gives different results in 2.3.x.
> 
>>> >>> import ConfigParser
>>> >>> cfg = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
>>> >>> a = cfg.read('adsfasfdasfd')
>>> >>> a, len(a), type(a)
>>> ([], 0, <type 'list'>)
> 
> Thx in advance.

Python 2.3.5 (#2, Jun 13 2006, 23:12:55)
[GCC 4.1.2 20060613 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> import ConfigParser
 >>> cfg = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
 >>> a = cfg.read('adsfasfdasfd')
 >>> a
 >>> type(a)
<type 'NoneType'>
 >>> len(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: len() of unsized object
 >>>