Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Reading configuration files


When your software has too many options to simply pass them all through the command line, or when you want to ensure that your users don't have to manually provide them every time they start the application, loading those options from a configuration file is one of the most widespread solutions.

Configuration files should be easy to read and write for humans, as they will be working with them quite often, and one of the most common requirements is for them to allow comments, so that the user can place comments in the configuration to write down why some options were set or how some values were computed. This way, when the user comes back to the configuration file in six months, they will still know the reasons for those options.

For these reasons, usually relying on JSON or machine-machine formats to configure options doesn't work very well, so a configuration-specific format is best.

One of the longest-living configuration formats is the .ini file, which allows...