parsing .properties file in Python

Question

The ConfigParser module raises an exception if one parses a simple Java-style .properties file, whose content is key-value pairs (i..e without INI-style section headers). Is there some workaround?

Answer 1

Say you have, e.g.:

$ cat my.props
first: primo
second: secondo
third: terzo

i.e. would be a .config format except that it's missing a leading section name. Then, it easy to fake the section header:

import ConfigParser

class FakeSecHead(object):
    def __init__(self, fp):
        self.fp = fp
        self.sechead = '[asection]\n'

    def readline(self):
        if self.sechead:
            try: 
                return self.sechead
            finally: 
                self.sechead = None
        else: 
            return self.fp.readline()

usage:

cp = ConfigParser.SafeConfigParser()
cp.readfp(FakeSecHead(open('my.props')))
print cp.items('asection')

output:

[('second', 'secondo'), ('third', 'terzo'), ('first', 'primo')]