Properties file in python (similar to Java Properties)

Question

I was able to get this to work with ConfigParser, no one showed any examples on how to do this, so here is a simple python reader of a property file and example of the property file. Note that the extension is still .properties, but I had to add a section header similar to what you see in .ini files... a bit of a bastardization, but it works.

The python file: PythonPropertyReader.py

#!/usr/bin/python    
import ConfigParser
config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
config.read('ConfigFile.properties')

print config.get('DatabaseSection', 'database.dbname');

The property file: ConfigFile.properties

[DatabaseSection]
database.dbname=unitTest
database.user=root
database.password=

For more functionality, read: https://docs.python.org/2/library/configparser.html

For .ini files there is the configparser module that provides a format compatible with .ini files.

Anyway there's nothing available for parsing complete .properties files, when I have to do that I simply use jython (I'm talking about scripting).

I know that this is a very old question, but I need it just now and I decided to implement my own solution, a pure python solution, that covers most uses cases (not all):

def load_properties(filepath, sep='=', comment_char='#'):
    """
    Read the file passed as parameter as a properties file.
    """
    props = {}
    with open(filepath, "rt") as f:
        for line in f:
            l = line.strip()
            if l and not l.startswith(comment_char):
                key_value = l.split(sep)
                key = key_value[0].strip()
                value = sep.join(key_value[1:]).strip().strip('"') 
                props[key] = value 
    return props

You can change the sep to ':' to parse files with format:

key : value

The code parses correctly lines like:

url = "http://my-host.com"
name = Paul = Pablo
# This comment line will be ignored

You'll get a dict with:

{"url": "http://my-host.com", "name": "Paul = Pablo" }

A java properties file is often valid python code as well. You could rename your myconfig.properties file to myconfig.py. Then just import your file, like this

import myconfig

and access the properties directly

print myconfig.propertyName1