DTD Parsing

[r0g]

On 10/11/10 20:38, Ian wrote:
> On Nov 10, 1:05 am, r0g<aioe.... at technicalbloke.com>  wrote:
>>> That's five whole lines of code. Why go to all that trouble when you can
>>> just do this:
>>
>>> import config
>>
>> Heh, mainly because I figure the config module will have a lot more
>> options than I have use for right now and therefore the docs will take
>> me longer to read than I will save by not just typing in the above ;)
>
> I think you misunderstand me.  There is no config module and there are
> no docs to read.  It's just the configuration file itself written as a
> Python script, containing arbitrary settings like:


So you're not talking about this then?...

http://www.red-dove.com/config-doc/

I see. You're suggesting writing config files IN the language you're 
already writing in?

Indeed that's what I do in many situations, it has the advantage of 
working in any scripting language (I do the same in PHP fairly often, as 
do several big projects like Drupal) and of course it spares you a bit 
of code.

However, if your config file it's meant to be distributed / editable by 
end users you don't necessarily want them to need a full understanding 
of python syntax to do it.

Also, actually parsing config files (rather than just importing 
namespaces) gives you an opportunity to deal with any syntax errors on a 
case by case basis i.e. skip, fail, issue warning etc. Just importing 
code gives you a kind of 100% consistency or death situation and while 
that might be exactly what you want many times there may be situations 
where you want a bit more fine grained control!

Roger