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Documentation

Writing the Setup Configuration File — Python 3.11.4 documentation

Example

Reading a Configuration File

Python config files are used to store configuration data for a program. One common file extension used for config files in Python is .cfg. These files are usually simple text files that contain key-value pairs, with each pair representing a particular configuration setting.

Here is an example of a simple .cfg file:

[Database]
host = localhost
port = 5432
database = mydatabase
username = myusername
password = mypassword

In Python, we can use the built-in configparser module to read and write .cfg files. Here is an example of how to read the values from the above config file:

import configparser

config = configparser.ConfigParser()
config.read('example.cfg')

host = config.get('Database', 'host')
port = config.getint('Database', 'port')
database = config.get('Database', 'database')
username = config.get('Database', 'username')
password = config.get('Database', 'password')

print(f"Connecting to {host}:{port}/{database} as {username}...")

In the above code, we first import the configparser module and create a new instance of the ConfigParser class. We then read in the contents of the example.cfg file using the read method.

We can then access the values in the config file using the get method, which takes two arguments: the section name and the option name. We use getint for the port option since we know it is an integer.

Finally, we print out a message using the values we retrieved from the config file.

Writing To a Configuration File

We can also use the set method to update values in the config file, and the write method to save any changes.

config.set('Database', 'password', 'newpassword')

with open('example.cfg', 'w') as configfile:
    config.write(configfile)

In the above code, we update the password option in the Database section to a new value using the set method. We then open the example.cfg file in write mode and use the write method to save the changes back to the file.

Using .cfg files in Python can make it easy to store and manage configuration data for your programs.