Parsing a setup file

[Tommy Grav]

Hi,

I have a setup file for some numerical simulation code written in
C that looks like this:

dt 0.1
time 0.0
nupdate 10
noutput 100
ntotal 10000
G 39.476926421373015
Sun 1.00000597682
mplanet 9.547861040430418e-4
3.409530427945 3.635870038323 .03424028779975
-2.0471057839802485 2.0178211484578044 -9.730193916219667e-4
mplanet 2.8558373315055975e-4
6.612079829705 6.386934883415 -.1361443021015
-1.5268292602445992 1.4623064051166743 6.108354829704997e-3
mplanet 4.372731645458918e-5
11.16769742623 16.04343604329 .3617849409933
-1.1927379555398092 .7563317049955387 -7.950313544811802e-3
particle
5.0 0.2 10.5
0.0 0.0 10.0
particle
6.0 0.1 5.5
0.0 180.0 -10.0

there can be any number of mplanet and particle enteries in the the
file.
As I am working on porting this code to python I am trying to figure out
an efficient way of parsing such data into the program. I have the
freedom
to play around with the setup file(s) which is nice. I have played
around with
cfgparse, which I like, and made a file like this

[DEFAULT]
dt = 0.1
time = 0.0

and so on, but that does not give me a good way of parsing in the
list of
mplanets and particles. I can write my own little parser to handle a
file
that contains only the mplanets or particles, but I am wondering if
there are
any parsers out there that will handle this type of data? Or is there a
way to organize my setup file that would simplify the input that I am
missing?

Cheers
Tommy

[James Stroud]

Tommy Grav wrote:

Hi,

I have a setup file for some numerical simulation code written in C
that looks like this:

dt 0.1
time 0.0
nupdate 10
noutput 100
ntotal 10000
G 39.476926421373015
Sun 1.00000597682
mplanet 9.547861040430418e-4
3.409530427945 3.635870038323 .03424028779975
-2.0471057839802485 2.0178211484578044 -9.730193916219667e-4
mplanet 2.8558373315055975e-4
6.612079829705 6.386934883415 -.1361443021015
-1.5268292602445992 1.4623064051166743 6.108354829704997e-3
mplanet 4.372731645458918e-5
11.16769742623 16.04343604329 .3617849409933
-1.1927379555398092 .7563317049955387 -7.950313544811802e-3
particle
5.0 0.2 10.5
0.0 0.0 10.0
particle
6.0 0.1 5.5
0.0 180.0 -10.0

there can be any number of mplanet and particle enteries in the the file.
As I am working on porting this code to python I am trying to figure out
an efficient way of parsing such data into the program. I have the freedom
to play around with the setup file(s) which is nice. I have played
around with
cfgparse, which I like, and made a file like this

[DEFAULT]
dt = 0.1
time = 0.0

and so on, but that does not give me a good way of parsing in the list of
mplanets and particles. I can write my own little parser to handle a file
that contains only the mplanets or particles, but I am wondering if
there are
any parsers out there that will handle this type of data? Or is there a
way to organize my setup file that would simplify the input that I am
missing?

Cheers
Tommy

pyaml is good for this kind of thing. No parser needed.
Also, you may be mistaken about ConfigParser, you just need
to indent line continuations (and who says the syntactical meaning of
whitespace is not a good thing?). E.g.:
euler 6% cat test.conf
[stuff]
mplanet = 4.372731645458918e-5
11.16769742623 16.04343604329 .3617849409933
-1.1927379555398092 .7563317049955387 -7.950313544811802e-3

pyfrom ConfigParser import ConfigParser
pyc = ConfigParser()
pyc.read('test.conf')
['test.conf']
pyc.items('stuff')

[('mplanet',
'4.372731645458918e-5\n11.16769742623 16.04343604329
..3617849409933\n-1.1927379555398092 .7563317049955387
-7.950313544811802e-3')]

James