Using ConfigParser to read a file without section name

Alex Martelli provided a solution for using ConfigParser to parse .properties files (which are apparently section-less config files).

His solution is a file-like wrapper that will automagically insert a dummy section heading to satisfy ConfigParser's requirements.

Enlightened by this answer by jterrace, I come up with this solution:

1. Read entire file into a string
2. Prefix with a default section name
3. Use StringIO to mimic a file-like object

ini_str = '[root]\n' + open(ini_path, 'r').read()ini_fp = StringIO.StringIO(ini_str)config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()config.readfp(ini_fp)

EDIT for future googlers: As of Python 3.4+ readfp is deprecated, and StringIO is not needed anymore. Instead we can use read_string directly:

with open('config_file') as f:    file_content = '[dummy_section]\n' + f.read()config_parser = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()config_parser.read_string(file_content)

You can do this in a single line of code.

In python 3, prepend a fake section header to your config file data, and pass it to read_string().

from configparser import ConfigParserparser = ConfigParser()with open("foo.conf") as stream:    parser.read_string("[top]\n" + stream.read())  # This line does the trick.

You could also use itertools.chain() to simulate a section header for read_file(). This might be more memory-efficient than the above approach, which might be helpful if you have large config files in a constrained runtime environment.

from configparser import ConfigParserfrom itertools import chainparser = ConfigParser()with open("foo.conf") as lines:    lines = chain(("[top]",), lines)  # This line does the trick.    parser.read_file(lines)

In python 2, prepend a fake section header to your config file data, wrap the result in a StringIO object, and pass it to readfp().

from ConfigParser import ConfigParserfrom StringIO import StringIOparser = ConfigParser()with open("foo.conf") as stream:    stream = StringIO("[top]\n" + stream.read())  # This line does the trick.    parser.readfp(stream)

With any of these approaches, your config settings will be available in parser.items('top').

You could use StringIO in python 3 as well, perhaps for compatibility with both old and new python interpreters, but note that it now lives in the io package and readfp() is now deprecated.

Alternatively, you might consider using a TOML parser instead of ConfigParser.