Updating section in ConfigParser (or an alternative)

Question

I am making a plugin for another program and so I am trying to make thing as lightweight as possible.

What i need to do is be able to update the name of a section in the ConfigParser's config file.

[project name]
author:john doe
email: [email protected]
year: 2010

I then have text fields where user can edit project's name, author, email and year.

I don't think changing [project name] is possible, so I have thought of two solutions:

1 -Have my config file like this:

[0]
projectname: foobar
author:john doe
email: [email protected]
year: 2010

that way i can change project's name just like another option. But the problem is, i would need the section # to be auto incremented ([0], [1], etc). And to do this i would have to get every section, sort of, and figure out what the next number should be.

The other option would be to delete the entire section and its value, and re-add it with the updated values which would require a little more work as well, such as passing a variable that holds the old section name through functions, etc, but i wouldn't mind if it's faster.

Which of the two is best? or is there another way? I am willing to go with the fastest/lightweight solution possible, doesn't matter if it requires more work or not.

Answer 1

ini files are probably best suited for configuring applications, with well-defined inputs and so forth. It sounds like you want a more generic serialization tool; JSON would probably work well for this. Perhaps you want to store a JSON representation of a list (hence your incrementing indices) of dicts with those fields?

The usage of the json module in the stdlib is pretty simple. For example, to store a couple records you would

import json

projects = []
projects.append({'project_name': 'foobar', 
                 'author': 'John Doe', 
                 'email': '[email protected]', 
                 'year': '2010'})
projects.append({'project_name': 'baz', 
                 'author': 'Cat Stevens', 
                 'email': '[email protected]', 
                 'year': '2009'})

with open('projects.json', 'w') as f:
    json.dump(projects, f)

Similarly you would recover the serialized data from the file with json.load(f), where you have opened f in read mode.