> If I used a simple INI file or CSV file, I would simply have to parse > my file once and match the name with the value. Why is it necessary to > parse a document once and then re-parse your information into a format > that you can use. This seems absurd to me. Any thoughts on this? Do > I even have the correct understanding of how this is done?
The problem here is that xml allows for modelling data-structures with parent-child relationships and preserve the order of elements. So it's much more capable than ini and csv - but that comes for the cost of more elaborated and somewhat complicated apis. A configuration file is only _one_ possible use case. So if you already found that ini-Files suit your needs - why don't you use them? There is a ConfigfileParser in python to parse these, and it gives you easy access to the defined sections and fields. And don't bother if ini-Files are popular on linux or not - on linux a great deal of different formats is popular, and nobody seems to care too much. E.g. samba uses ini-style config, too. -- Regards, Diez B. Roggisch -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
