Properties file in python (similar to Java Properties)

python properties
Andrei Ciobanu picture Andrei Ciobanu · Aug 29, 2010 · Viewed 182.2k times · Source

Given the following format (.properties or .ini):

propertyName1=propertyValue1
propertyName2=propertyValue2
...
propertyNameN=propertyValueN

For Java there is the Properties class that offers functionality to parse / interact with the above format.

Is there something similar in python's standard library (2.x) ?

If not, what other alternatives do I have ?

Answer

James Oravec picture James Oravec · Oct 6, 2014

I was able to get this to work with ConfigParser, no one showed any examples on how to do this, so here is a simple python reader of a property file and example of the property file. Note that the extension is still .properties, but I had to add a section header similar to what you see in .ini files... a bit of a bastardization, but it works.

The python file: PythonPropertyReader.py

#!/usr/bin/python    
import ConfigParser
config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
config.read('ConfigFile.properties')

print config.get('DatabaseSection', 'database.dbname');

The property file: ConfigFile.properties

[DatabaseSection]
database.dbname=unitTest
database.user=root
database.password=

For more functionality, read: https://docs.python.org/2/library/configparser.html

Related questions

How does the @property decorator work in Python?

I would like to understand how the built-in function property works. What confuses me is that property can also be used as a decorator, but it only takes arguments when used as a built-in function and not when used as …

Read More
Using @property versus getters and setters

Here is a pure Python-specific design question: class MyClass(object): ... def get_my_attr(self): ... def set_my_attr(self, value): ... and class MyClass(object): ... @property def my_attr(self): ... @my_attr.setter def my_attr(self, value): ... Python lets …

Read More
How to add property to a class dynamically?

The goal is to create a mock class which behaves like a db resultset. So for example, if a database query returns, using a dict expression, {'ab':100, 'cd':200}, then I would like to see: >>> dummy.ab 100 At …

Read More