[Tutor] File like object for Windows registry

[Andre Roberge]

On 8/3/06, Henry Finucane <h.finucane at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/3/06, K.Weinert at gmx.net <K.Weinert at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > My app should run on debian and windows platforms. For storing the configuration data, I use the ConfigParser module.
> >
> > What I find difficult is to determine a place for my configuration file. On debian, it is simply
> >
> > os.path.join(os.path.expanduser("~")),"myconfig")

This works on Windows as well.  I just tried it :-)

> >
> > but what am I supposed to do on Windows? I think a clean solution would be to create a file-like object that reads and writes to the registry, is it?

Messing with the registry is (imo)  a bad idea.

>
> You might be able to do that, I don't know much about win32
> programming, but I believe a better solution is to use the built-in
> windows variables. %APPDATA% is where you should store user-specific
> application data (and even Microsoft is starting to store XML
> configuration files there), and it's an easy variable to get.
>
> >>> import os
> >>> os.environ["APPDATA"]
> 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\UserName\\Application Data'
>
> That should function just fine as a home directory replacement.
>
...

André