best practice for user preferences in $HOME in Python

Question

For some (small) programs I'm writing in Python, I'd like to be able to set, store and retrieve user preferences in a file in a portable (multi-platform) way.

I'm obviously thinking about a very simple ConfigParser file like "~/.program" or "~/.program/program.cfg".

Is os.path.expanduser() the best way for achieving this or there's something more easy/straightforward that I'm missing?

Answer 1

os.path.expanduser("~")

is more portable than

os.environ['HOME']

so it should be ok to use the first.

Answer 2

You can use os.environ:

import os
print os.environ["HOME"]