tommy's scratchpad

Alot of tools out there have some sort of configuration which, at run time, is read and used in the process accordingly.  When writing tools, my config file format has always been something like:

title: My Tool

# commented out line

description: This is my tool.  # another comment

Since I’m using Python for much of my scripting these days, I decided to write a small parser to handle this type of config.  So here’s what I’ve come up with:

import fileinput, re

def parse(file=None, delim=':'):
    '''
        Parses a config file formatted like:
        foo: bar
        # comments: out line
        - comments allowed (#)
        - empty lines allowed
        - spaces allowed

    '''

    d = {}

    if file is None:
        return -1

    for line in fileinput.input(file):
        if not line.strip(): # skip empty or space padded lines
            continue
        if re.compile('^#').search(line) is not None: # skip commented lines
            continue
        else: # pick up key and value pairs
            kvp = line.strip().split(delim)
            if kvp[1].strip().split('#') is not None:
                d[kvp[0].strip()] = kvp[1].split('#')[0].strip()
            else:
                d[kvp[0].strip()] = kvp[1].strip()
    return d

Seems to work well so far.  I wonder if there’s a config file standard out there?