Question

How can I convert the result of a ConfigParser.items(‘section’) to a dictionary to format a string like here:

import ConfigParser

config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read('conf.ini')

connection_string = ("dbname='%(dbname)s' user='%(dbuser)s' host='%(host)s' "
                     "password='%(password)s' port='%(port)s'")

print connection_string % config.items('db')

Answer 1

This is actually already done for you in config._sections. Example:

$ cat test.ini
[First Section]
var = value
key = item

[Second Section]
othervar = othervalue
otherkey = otheritem

And then:

>>> from ConfigParser import ConfigParser
>>> config = ConfigParser()
>>> config.read('test.ini')
>>> config._sections
{'First Section': {'var': 'value', '__name__': 'First Section', 'key': 'item'}, 'Second Section': {'__name__': 'Second Section', 'otherkey': 'otheritem', 'othervar': 'othervalue'}}
>>> config._sections['First Section']
{'var': 'value', '__name__': 'First Section', 'key': 'item'}

Edit: My solution to the same problem was downvoted so I’ll further illustrate how my answer does the same thing without having to pass the section thru dict(), because config._sections is provided by the module for you already.

Example test.ini:

[db]
dbname = testdb
dbuser = test_user
host   = localhost
password = abc123
port   = 3306

Magic happening:

>>> config.read('test.ini')
['test.ini']
>>> config._sections
{'db': {'dbname': 'testdb', 'host': 'localhost', 'dbuser': 'test_user', '__name__': 'db', 'password': 'abc123', 'port': '3306'}}
>>> connection_string = "dbname='%(dbname)s' user='%(dbuser)s' host='%(host)s' password='%(password)s' port='%(port)s'"
>>> connection_string % config._sections['db']
"dbname='testdb' user='test_user' host='localhost' password='abc123' port='3306'"

So this solution is not wrong, and it actually requires one less step. Thanks for stopping by!