Question

I am parsing a config file I would like to get only the values which are file paths in the file

for example the config file has

apache.access =  /var/log/apache2/access.log
apache.errors = /var/log/apache2/errors.log

I would like to get only ‘/var/log/apache2/access.log’ and ‘/var/log/apache2/errors.log’ from the

COMMENT_CHAR = '#'
OPTION_CHAR =  '='



def parse_config(filename):
    options = {}
    f = open(filename)
    for line in f:
        if COMMENT_CHAR in line:
           line, comment = line.split(COMMENT_CHAR, 1)
        if OPTION_CHAR in line:
            option, value = line.split(OPTION_CHAR, 1)
            option = option.strip()
            value = value.strip()
            options[option] = value
    f.close()
    return options 

I tried this but it gives all the options and values in the file

apache.access : /var/log/apache2/access.log

apache.errors : /var/log/apache2/errors.log

Answer 1

First you have to define, what is a file path (1. does it have to exist? 2. does it have to be creatable in an existing directory? 3. anything else?). This tests whether the given string is a path pointing to an existing dir/file:

import os

# ...

[v for v in options.itervalues() if os.path.exists(v)]