Question

Normally, I code as follows for getting a particular item in a variable as follows

try:
    config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
    config.read(self.iniPathName)
except ConfigParser.MissingSectionHeaderError, e:
    raise WrongIniFormatError(`e`)

try:
    self.makeDB = config.get("DB","makeDB")
except ConfigParser.NoOptionError:
    self.makeDB = 0

Is there any way to read all the contents in a python dictionary?

For example

[A]
x=1
y=2
z=3
[B]
x=1
y=2
z=3

is written into

val["A"]["x"] = 1
...
val["B"]["z"] = 3

Answer 1

I suggest subclassing ConfigParser.ConfigParser (or SafeConfigParser, &c) to safely access the “protected” attributes (names starting with single underscore — “private” would be names starting with two underscores, not to be accessed even in subclasses…):

import ConfigParser

class MyParser(ConfigParser.ConfigParser):

    def as_dict(self):
        d = dict(self._sections)
        for k in d:
            d[k] = dict(self._defaults, **d[k])
            d[k].pop('__name__', None)
        return d

This emulates the usual logic of config parsers, and is guaranteed to work in all versions of Python where there’s a ConfigParser.py module (up to 2.7, which is the last of the 2.* series — knowing that there will be no future Python 2.any versions is how compatibility can be guaranteed;-).

If you need to support future Python 3.* versions (up to 3.1 and probably the soon forthcoming 3.2 it should be fine, just renaming the module to all-lowercase configparser instead of course) it may need some attention/tweaks a few years down the road, but I wouldn’t expect anything major.