Does inifile support multiline values?

[paternal]

I think that the answer is no, but I am asking anyway. It can be handy to store long values.

Side-question: What are the features of this package that stdlib configparser is missing (asking since multi-line values are handled by configparser)?

-- Louis

[dairiki]

As you say, it appears the answer is no. I think multi-line values could be supported by subclassing Dialect and customizing (just) the tokenize and (probably) the kv_serialize methods.

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As for differences from configparser, the biggest ones (the ones hardest to hack back in) seems to be:

• configparser does not have any mechanism that preserves comments and blank lines if a .ini file is edited by loading it, modifying the ConfigParser then writing it back out.
• configparser does not appear to support any key/value settings before the first section header. In fact it raises a MissingSectionHeaderError when such settings are found. (Lektor and/or its plugins uses some of these.)
• configparser does not appear to support any kind of quoting of the value in key/value pairs. It also seems to always strip any leading and trailing white-space from values (and from each line of multi-line values).

The API for accessing the config data differs between IniFile and ConfigParser. IniFile presents a flat dict with keys of the form <section>.<key>, while ConfigParser presents roughly a nested-dict interface. But, if that matters, I think an adapter could be constructed to make a ConfigParser look like an IniFile as far as data access.