👀 Views: 429 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-17

python configparser ini parsing Python

I'm trying to implement I'm trying to figure out I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm trying to parse an INI configuration file using Python's built-in `configparser` module, but I'm running into issues when it comes to nested sections and comments. My INI file looks something like this: ``` [Database] user = db_user password = db_pass [Server] host = localhost port = 8080 [Logging] level = DEBUG # This is a comment [Database:Connection] # Special settings for the connection max_connections = 10 timeout = 30 ``` I've set up my code to read this file like this: ```python import configparser config = configparser.ConfigParser() config.read('config.ini') print(config.sections()) # Output: ['Database', 'Server', 'Logging'] print(config['Database']) # Works fine print(config['Database:Connection']) # Throws an behavior ``` When I try to access the `Database:Connection` section, I get a `KeyError`. I understand that `configparser` doesn't support nested sections with colons out of the box, and I need to figure out a clean way to handle this situation. I tried replacing colons with underscores like this: ```python config = configparser.ConfigParser() config.optionxform = str # Preserve case sensitivity config.read('config.ini') for section in config.sections(): new_section = section.replace(':', '_') config[new_section] = config[section] ``` However, this still doesn't help with accessing the comments I have in the file. I also considered pre-processing the file to remove comments and handle nested sections manually but that feels inefficient. Is there a better approach to parsing this kind of INI file while retaining comments and properly handling sections? I'm using Python 3.9.1, and any advice on best practices would be greatly appreciated! How would you solve this? For reference, this is a production microservice. Any help would be greatly appreciated! This is for a desktop app running on CentOS.