Python's ConfigParser unique keys per section

Question

I read the part of the docs and saw that the ConfigParser returns a list of key/value pairs for the options within a section. I figured that keys did not need t

Answer 1

This deficiency of ConfigParser is the reason why pyglet used patched version of epydoc to replace ConfigParser ini with this simple format:

name: pyglet
url: http://www.pyglet.org/

output: html
target: doc/api/
...    
module: pyglet

exclude: pyglet.gl.gl
exclude: pyglet.gl.agl
exclude: pyglet.gl.lib_agl
exclude: pyglet.gl.wgl
...

If you don't need sections - this approach can be useful.

Answer 2

ConfigParser isn't designed to handle such conditions. Furthermore, your config file doesn't make sense to me.

ConfigParser gives you a dict-like structure for each section, so when you call parser.items(section), I'm expecting similar output to dict.items(), which is just a list of key/value tuples. I would never expect to see something like:

[('spam', 'eggs'), ('spam', 'ham')]

Not to mention, how would you expect the following to behave?:

parser.get('Some Section', 'spam')

Which is the intended way to retrieve values.

If you want to store multiple values for the same key, I would suggest something like this in your config file:

[Some Section]
spam: eggs, ham

And this in your code:

spam_values = [v.strip() for v in parser.get('Some Section', 'spam').split(',')]

Of course, this will only work for values that don't contain commas themselves or handle quoting. For that, you should employ a more advanced technique (see this and this).

EDIT: If you don't mind the extra dependency, You could check out ConfigObj, which natively supports lists as a value type.