On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:46:42PM -0400, Fred Drake wrote: > On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Florian Bruhin <m...@the-compiler.org> > wrote: > > While it seems ConfigParser doesn't do any escaping as all, I'm > > thinking it should at least raise some exception when such a value is > > trying to be set. > > > > I'd expect writing something and then reading it back via the same > > configparser to *always* result in the same data, as long as writing > > worked without error. > > > > Thoughts? Should I submit a bug report? > > I believe you should, if only to provide a place to record why no > change gets made. > > Had ConfigParser been more careful from the beginning, that would have > been really good. > > At this point, it would be a backward-incompatible change, so it's > unlikely such a change could be allowed to affect existing code.
It seems to me that the current behaviour is a bug and should be fixed. I think the relevant part of the docs is the part following the "comment_prefixes" and "inline_comment_prefixes" section: Please note that config parsers don’t support escaping of comment prefixes so using inline_comment_prefixes may prevent users from specifying option values with characters used as comment prefixes. When in doubt, avoid setting inline_comment_prefixes. In any circumstances, the only way of storing comment prefix characters at the beginning of a line in multiline values is to interpolate the prefix, for example: ... This is *seriously* underspecified, which is a bug in itself: option *values* don't support including inline_comment_prefixes, but do option *keys* support them? How about keys beginning with comment_prefixes? The specification doesn't say, but nor does it say that it's undefined behaviour. I think that a line beginning with "#spam" is ambiguous, it isn't clear if it is intended as a comment "spam" or a key starting with #, so by the Zen, configparser should refuse to guess. -- Steven _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
