Assigning more than one value to the same key in configuration file

Question

I am trying to create a configuration file and need to parse it with python using ConfigParser module

For example i had the below settings in a file config.sr

[basic]
basic=bz2,calendar,Core,ctype,curl,date,dom,ereg,exif,fileinfo,filter,ftp,gd,gettext,gmp,mhash,mysql,mysqli,openssl,pcntl,pcre,PDO,pdo_mysql,pdo_sqlite,Phar,readline

[advance]
advance=Reflection,session,shmop,SimpleXML,sockets,SPL,sqlite3,standard,tokenizer,wddx,xdebug,xml,xmlreader,xmlwriter,xsl,zip,zlib,Xdebug

So as you can see there are more values(29) separated with comma and assigned to a single key basic, and working fine when i used ConfigParser module to parse it and fetched the results, but the assigned values are too long to declare.

when i assigned them in multiple lines its displaying some errors, more over the number of values separated by comma will be increased further to 50, due to which it causes some readability problem to move over the cursor forward continuosly.

Finally what all i want to know is how can we declare the the values related to single key in multiple lines in configuration ?

Example Format

[basic]
basic=bz2,calendar,Core,ctype,curl,date,dom,ereg,exif,fileinfo,filter,ftp,gd,gettext,gmp,

hash,iconv,json,libxml,mbstring,mcrypt,mhash,mysql,mysqli,openssl,pcntl,pcre,PDO,pdo_mysql,

pdo_sqlite,Phar,readline

.............

Answer 1

Indent them:

[basic]
basic:
    bz2
    calendar
    Core
    ctype
    curl
    date
    dom
    ereg
    exif
    fileinfo
    filter
    ftp
    gd
    gettext
    gmp
    mhash
    mysql
    mysqli
    openssl
    pcntl
    pcre
    PDO
    pdo_mysql
    pdo_sqlite
    Phar
    readline

ConfigParser will then have a list, which you can do what you like with.

config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read('config.sr')
basic_list = config.get('basic', 'basic').split('\n')

Edit:

Running the code as follows: My config.sr:

[basic]
basic:
    bz2
    calendar
    Core
    ctype
    curl
    date
    dom
    ereg
    exif
    fileinfo
    filter
    ftp
    gd
    gettext
    gmp
    mhash
    mysql
    mysqli
    openssl
    pcntl
    pcre
    PDO
    pdo_mysql
    pdo_sqlite
    Phar
    readline

[advanced]
advanced:
    a
    b
    c
    d
    e

And my python file: q_14934291.py:

import ConfigParser

config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read('config.sr')

basic_list = config.get('basic', 'basic').split('\n')
print('Basic list:')
print(basic_list)

advanced_list = config.get('advanced', 'advanced').split('\n')
print('\n\nAdvanced list:')
print(advanced_list)

Output of running it:

Basic list:
['', 'bz2', 'calendar', 'Core', 'ctype', 'curl', 'date', 'dom', 'ereg', 'exif', 'fileinfo', 'filter', 'ftp', 'gd', 'gettext', 'gmp', 'mhash', 'mysql', 'mysqli', 'openssl', 'pcntl', 'pcre', 'PDO', 'pdo_mysql', 'pdo_sqlite', 'Phar', 'readline']


Advanced list:
['', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']

Make sure you're using the right indentation (4 spaces). If you use the wrong indentation, it will cause an error.

Also, you need to .split('\n') on the entry. I forgot that part sorry.

If you don't want the empty entry at the start, also strip the input:

basic_list = config.get('basic', 'basic').strip().split('\n')