Question

e.g. A configuration file can have

CFLAGS = "xyz"
CXXFLAGS = "xyz"

OR

CXXFLAGS = "xyz"
CFLAGS = "xyz"

Best implementation I could think of would be to just split the argument and feed the left side into a switch

for line in file
    x = line.split("=")
    switch(x[0])
        case CFLAGS
             do cflags
        case CXXFLAGS
             do cxxflags

But how do people who have way more experience than me do it? I know theres probably some open source programs who do this but I wouldn’t even know where to look in their source for this.
I program mainly in python and C so implementations/pseudocode/whattolookup in both would be preferred although other languages are fine also.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. try to avoid saying any form of re, regex, regexp, regular expressions, or any derivative thereof in your answers unless its unavoidable :P.

Answer 1

As Eli Bendersky says, in Python you should just use the provided ConfigParser.

If you insist on doing it yourself, his method of storing the configuration as a dictionary is one I recommend. Another way is to map the options to functions which process the values and do something with them:

# Map the options to functions to handle them.
handlers = {
    'CFLAGS': some_function,
    'CXXFLAGS': other_function,
}

# Loop through each option.
for line in configuration:
    # Get the option and value.
    option, value = line.split('=')
    option = option.strip().upper()
    value = value.strip()

    # Try to find a handler and process the option.
    handler = handlers.get(option)
    if handler:
        handler(option, value)
    else:
        raise Exception('Unknown option.')

Obviously, the handler functions must be able to accept the option and value parameters you’re passing it.