Lists in ConfigParser

Also a bit late, but maybe helpful for some. I am using a combination of ConfigParser and JSON:

[Foo]
fibs: [1,1,2,3,5,8,13]

just read it with:

>>> json.loads(config.get("Foo","fibs"))
[1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13]

You can even break lines if your list is long (thanks @peter-smit):

[Bar]
files_to_check = [
     "/path/to/file1",
     "/path/to/file2",
     "/path/to/another file with space in the name"
     ]

Of course i could just use JSON, but i find config files much more readable, and the [DEFAULT] Section very handy.

There is nothing stopping you from packing the list into a delimited string and then unpacking it once you get the string from the config. If you did it this way your config section would look like:

[Section 3]
barList=item1,item2

It's not pretty but it's functional for most simple lists.

Coming late to this party, but I recently implemented this with a dedicated section in a config file for a list:

[paths]
path1           = /some/path/
path2           = /another/path/
...

and using config.items( "paths" ) to get an iterable list of path items, like so:

path_items = config.items( "paths" )
for key, path in path_items:
    #do something with path

Hope this helps other folk Googling this question ;)