Re: [Configobj-develop] List handling in Validator

[Michael F. <fuz...@vo...>]

On 26/12/2010 11:49, Stefan Parviainen wrote:
> I've noticed some issues with how list types are handled in Validate.
> There are several different list types, including, int_list  for
> integers, string_list for strings, etc. IMHO the list handling could
> be generalized to be much more useful.
>
> Right now there is no easy way to declare a list of e.g. integers with
> min and max values. You could declare a completely new type,
> "list_of_ints_min_0_max_10" but in practice it's not really feasible.
> It's also not easily possible to declare a list containing some custom
> type.
>
> I think an optional argument, type, should be added to the list type,
> so something like this would be possible:
>
> list(type=int(min=0,max=10), min=1, max=2)
>
> This would also solve problems with inconsistent naming (integer vs.
> int_list types). The old types could be kept for backwards
> compatibility.

This sounds like a good change.

> I've reported one issue related to lists, and three other issues (some
> with patches) to the Google Code issue tracker at
> http://code.google.com/p/configobj/issues/ but have not gotten any
> reaction to them. Is the Google Code tracker the correct place to
> report bugs? If not, could this be clarified somewhere?
>
Google code tracker is the correct place. I'm not using ConfigObj a 
great deal myself at the moment so don't have much spare time to work on 
it. I will eventually get to it though.

I see you submitted a patch along with issue 26, but no tests. Patches 
with tests and documentation are likely to get applied *much* sooner. :-)

Note that in issue 26 values will *already* have been converted to lists 
if they are in list format - so doing an *additional* split on ',' is 
incorrect. For example this single string does *not* represent a list:

     value = "something, with, commas"

I'm really not sure about issue 19 - only supporting # for comments was 
a deliberate design decision and in general I'm against making the 
configobj API more complex. Issue 3 has been merged into the Python 3 
port. Other than these it looks like most issues could be resolved in a 
new release.

All the best,

Michael Foord

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