How can I remove the white characters from configuration file?

Question

I would like to modify the samba configuration file using python. This is my code

from ConfigParser import SafeConfigParser
parser = SafeConfigParser()
parser.read( '/etc/samba/smb.conf' )

for section in parser.sections():
    print section
    for name, value in parser.items( section ):
        print '  %s = %r' % ( name, value )

but the configuration file contains tab, is there any possibility to ignore the tabs?

ConfigParser.ParsingError: File contains parsing errors: /etc/samba/smb.conf
    [line 38]: '\tworkgroup = WORKGROUP\n'

Answer 1

Try this:

from StringIO import StringIO

data = StringIO('\n'.join(line.strip() for line in open('/etc/samba/smb.conf')))

parser = SafeConfigParser()
parser.readfp(data)
...

Another way (thank @mgilson for idea):

class stripfile(file):
    def readline(self):
        return super(FileStripper, self).readline().strip()

parser = SafeConfigParser()
with stripfile('/path/to/file') as f:
    parser.readfp(f)