pgdb connection string

[Johannes Bauer]

Hello group,

I've run into a small problem with pgdb which is actually not PostgreSQL 
specific - I just do not understand the Python syntax at one point.

I'm trying to initialize a connection to a PG database. So help(pgdb) says:

pgdb.connect(connect_string) -> connection
             connect_string = 'host:database:user:password:opt:tty'
             All parts are optional. You may also pass host through
             password as keyword arguments. To pass a port, pass it in
             the host keyword parameter:
                     pgdb.connect(host='localhost:5432')

Now from what I understand is that it accepts a string in the form:

"%s:%s:%s:%s" % (conf["db"]["hostname"],
                  conf["db"]["database"],
                  conf["db"]["username"],
                  conf["db"]["password"])

Which actually works. But if I want to pass the port, there's one more 
colon and it parses garbage. So what exactly is this host="foobar" 
syntax all about? What exactly is passed to pgdb.connect (because it 
does not seem to be a string) - is it a dictionary or something?

I'm puzzled.

Regards,
Johannes

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