Simple ini Config parser examples needed

[Tim Chase]

> Tim provided a correct-looking answer, albeit somewhat
> complex, as it doesn't reuse the logic in the ConfigParser.

It didn't start out very complex, but it was so easy to make it a 
bit more robust with such a scant few lines of code that I went 
ahead.  The original just looked like

   options = {}
   for line in file("simple.ini"):
     line = line.rstrip("\r\n")
     if '=' in line:
       key, value = line.split('=', 1)
       options[key] = value

which is about as simple as it gets.  However, this doesn't 
handle commented lines nicely (OP didn't mention whether there 
were comments), the keys are case-sensitive (often not a desired 
behavior), and leading/trailing whitespace for both the key & 
value are preserved (also rarely desired), and in the event of a 
malformed line (with no '='), it fails indistinguishably from a 
blank line and silently.

The big advantages given by the ConfigParser hack (tacking on a 
fake section-header)

- it provides the convenience methods for pulling out an 
int/float/bool in addition to a string

- possibly handles continued lines (I saw something in the source 
referring to this)

- it handles merging config files from multiple sources (such as 
/etc/foo_rc  then merged with ~/.foo_rc)

- encourages use-of and learning-about a standard library module

- and it handles string substitution if you want it.


It also provides for defaults, but the standard dict has the 
get() method to allow for defaults, and the library offers the 
default-dict.

<ramble>
As a personal aside, it does bug me that the ConfigParser .get*() 
methods don't afford an optional default value like dict.get() in 
the event you want a value that may be present in the config file 
but isn't in the [DEFAULT] section when present raising a 
NoSectionError or NoOptionError.  I.e. I'd like to be able to call

   cp.get('some_section', 'some_key', '42')

on an empty config.ini file and get back the "42" as if it 
existed in "some_section" rather than throwing an exception/error 
(and why the heck do these "exceptions" descend from Error rather 
than Exception?  These aren't errors...they're exceptions)

</ramble>

-tkc