Configparser set with no section

Question

Is there a way for configparser in python to set a value without having sections in the config file?

If not please tell me of any alternatives.

Thank you.

more info: So basically I have a config file with format: Name: value It's a system file that I want to change the value for a given name. I was wondering if this can be done easily with a module instead of manually writing a parser.

Answer 1

You could use the csv module to do most of work of parsing the file and writing it back out after you made changes -- so it should be relatively easy to use. I got the idea from one of the answers to a similar question titled Using ConfigParser to read a file without section name.

However I've made a number of changes to it, including coding it to work in both Python 2 & 3, unhardcoding the key/value delimiter it uses so it could be almost anything (but be a colon by default), along with several optimizations.

from __future__ import print_function  # For main() test function.
import csv
import sys
PY3 = sys.version_info.major > 2


def read_properties(filename, delimiter=':'):
    """ Reads a given properties file with each line in the format:
        key<delimiter>value. The default delimiter is ':'.

        Returns a dictionary containing the pairs.

            filename -- the name of the file to be read
    """
    open_kwargs = dict(mode='r', newline='') if PY3 else dict(mode='rb')

    with open(filename, **open_kwargs) as csvfile:
        reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=delimiter, escapechar='\\',
                            quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)
        return {row[0]: row[1] for row in reader}


def write_properties(filename, dictionary, delimiter=':'):
    """ Writes the provided dictionary in key-sorted order to a properties
        file with each line of the format: key<delimiter>value
        The default delimiter is ':'.

            filename -- the name of the file to be written
            dictionary -- a dictionary containing the key/value pairs.
    """
    open_kwargs = dict(mode='w', newline='') if PY3 else dict(mode='wb')

    with open(filename, **open_kwargs) as csvfile:
        writer = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=delimiter, escapechar='\\',
                            quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)
        writer.writerows(sorted(dictionary.items()))


def main():
    data = {
        'Answer': '6*7 = 42',
        'Knights': 'Ni!',
        'Spam': 'Eggs',
    }

    filename = 'test.properties'
    write_properties(filename, data)  # Create csv from data dictionary.

    newdata = read_properties(filename)  # Read it back into a new dictionary.
    print('Properties read: ')
    print(newdata)
    print()

    # Show the actual contents of file.
    with open(filename, 'rb') as propfile:
        contents = propfile.read().decode()
    print('File contains: (%d bytes)' % len(contents))
    print('contents:', repr(contents))
    print()

    # Tests whether data is being preserved.
    print(['Failure!', 'Success!'][data == newdata])

if __name__ == '__main__':
     main()