[Python-Dev] [patch] Duplicate sections detection in ConfigParser (original) (raw)

Yannick Gingras ygingras at ygingras.net
Tue Feb 3 07:34:13 CET 2009

Greetings Pythonistas, ConfigParser as you most certainly know is a .ini parser included in the Python standard library. It's documentation mentions a DuplicateSectionError but I was puzzled after hunting a bug in our application that this error was not raised when parsing a file with duplicate sections. After looking at the code, it turns out that DuplicateSectionError is only raised when using the builder interface; the parser interface will never throw it.

The attached patch is compatible with both the 2.x and the 3.x branches; it adds a unique_sects parameter to the constructor of RawConfigParser and a test in the parser loop that raises DuplicateSectionError if a section is seen more then once and that unique_sects is True.

This is just a proof of concept and I'd like your opinion on it before working on the final version. I see two main issues regarding backward compatibility and uniformity. For uniformity unique_sects should also apply to the builder interface. However, if it does, it should default to True since it was the default behavior for the builder interface to raise on duplicate sections. On the other hand, the default behavior for the parser interface was to ignore duplicate sections so making unique_sects default to True might break existing code.

To summarize, I ask you all:

Best regards,

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