How to get case-sensitivity in Section names?

Question

I've got an win32 app accessed by users via RDP acess. Each user has his/her own user_app.ini file.

When I upgrade my app on the RDP server, I sometimes need to create/modify entries in the user_app.ini file of each user. I wrote a Python script to handle the job that use some upgrade.ini file to update all the user_app.ini files, using the ConfigParser module.

My problem is that my section names should be seen as case insensitive, but ConfigParser is case-sensitive regarding sections (while it can be case insensitve regarding options using optionxform() )

Can someone help me ? Thanks

Answer 1

There is an SECTCRE attribute that you can override. This should define a regular expression that will match the section name.

Instead of a regex you can pass any object that has a match method which takes a string and returns an object which has a group method that accepts the string 'header' as parameter.

For example:

class FakeRe:
    def __init__(self, regex):
        self.regex = regex
    def match(self, text):
        m = self.regex.match(text)
        if m:
            return FakeMatch(m)
        return None

class FakeMatch:
    def __init__(self, match):
        self.match = match
    def group(self, name):
        return self.match.group(name).lower()

You could then set that attribute when creating a parser:

config = ConfigParser()
config.SECTCRE = FakeRe(re.compile(r'\[\s*(?P<header>some regex here)\s*\]')

and this parser should consider all section names as lower-case.

You may have to tweak the code a bit, depending on your exact needs.