parsing .properties file in Python

Say you have, e.g.:

$ cat my.propsfirst: primosecond: secondothird: terzo

i.e. would be a .config format except that it's missing a leading section name. Then, it easy to fake the section header:

import ConfigParserclass FakeSecHead(object):    def __init__(self, fp):        self.fp = fp        self.sechead = '[asection]\n'    def readline(self):        if self.sechead:            try:                 return self.sechead            finally:                 self.sechead = None        else:             return self.fp.readline()

usage:

cp = ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser()cp.readfp(FakeSecHead(open('my.props')))print cp.items('asection')

output:

[('second', 'secondo'), ('third', 'terzo'), ('first', 'primo')]

I thought MestreLion's "read_string" comment was nice and simple and deserved an example.

For Python 3.2+, you can implement the "dummy section" idea like this:

with open(CONFIG_PATH, 'r') as f:    config_string = '[dummy_section]\n' + f.read()config = configparser.ConfigParser()config.read_string(config_string)

My solution is to use StringIO and prepend a simple dummy header:

import StringIOimport osconfig = StringIO.StringIO()config.write('[dummysection]\n')config.write(open('myrealconfig.ini').read())config.seek(0, os.SEEK_SET)import ConfigParsercp = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()cp.readfp(config)somevalue = cp.getint('dummysection', 'somevalue')