Read all the contents in ini file into dictionary with Python

Question

Normally, I code as follows for getting a particular item in a variable as follows

try:     config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()     config.read(self.iniPathName) except ConfigParser.MissingSectionHeaderError, e:     raise WrongIniFormatError(`e`)  try:     self.makeDB = config.get("DB","makeDB") except ConfigParser.NoOptionError:     self.makeDB = 0 

Is there any way to read all the contents in a python dictionary?

For example

 [A] x=1 y=2 z=3 [B] x=1 y=2 z=3 

is written into

 val["A"]["x"] = 1 ... val["B"]["z"] = 3 

Answer 1

I suggest subclassing ConfigParser.ConfigParser (or SafeConfigParser, &c) to safely access the "protected" attributes (names starting with single underscore -- "private" would be names starting with two underscores, not to be accessed even in subclasses...):

import ConfigParser  class MyParser(ConfigParser.ConfigParser):      def as_dict(self):         d = dict(self._sections)         for k in d:             d[k] = dict(self._defaults, **d[k])             d[k].pop('__name__', None)         return d 

This emulates the usual logic of config parsers, and is guaranteed to work in all versions of Python where there's a ConfigParser.py module (up to 2.7, which is the last of the 2.* series -- knowing that there will be no future Python 2.any versions is how compatibility can be guaranteed;-).

If you need to support future Python 3.* versions (up to 3.1 and probably the soon forthcoming 3.2 it should be fine, just renaming the module to all-lowercase configparser instead of course) it may need some attention/tweaks a few years down the road, but I wouldn't expect anything major.

Answer 2

I managed to get an answer, but I expect there should be a better one.

dictionary = {} for section in config.sections():     dictionary[section] = {}     for option in config.options(section):         dictionary[section][option] = config.get(section, option)