On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 20:50, Dave <dbola...@offilive.com> wrote: > > I'm doing a small application and want to add user preferences. Did > some googling to see if there are standard Python ways/tools, but it > seems not so much. My specific questions are: > > 1. Best practices for a user preference file/system?
Put them in the appropriate config directory (see answer to Q3). Windows has the registry and macOS has User Defaults, but a custom format is fine, especially if you’re making something multi-platform. > 2. File format favored and why - ini, JSON, etc? If you want/expect humans to edit it, go with INI (configparser). Otherwise (if the editing is done via your app with a nice UI), JSON can express more than just key-value mappings, although there are no comments, and its strict syntax requirements can be problematic for non-programmers trying to edit the file. Randomly loading .py or pickle files can potentially be unsafe; writing .py files in an automated way is not trivial. I wouldn’t bother with any other formats, mainly since they are not supported in stdlib, although if you need human editing and more advanced structures, then maybe YAML/TOML (they aren’t as foolproof as INI though). > 3. File location? I'm using Ubuntu and I believe that the correct > location would be home/.config/<app-name> . What about Mac and Windows? https://pypi.org/project/appdirs/ -- Chris Warrick <https://chriswarrick.com/> PGP: 5EAAEA16 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
