How to refer to data files without hardcoding paths?

Sat Sep 5 21:49:26 EDT 2009

Matthew Wilson <matt at tplus1.com> writes:
> Today I realized that I'm hardcoding paths in my app. They are
> relative paths based on os.getcwd(), but at some point, I'll be
> running scripts that use this code, these open(...) calls will fail.

The conventional solution to this is:
* Read configuration settings, whether directory paths or anything else,
 from a configuration file of declarative options.
* Have the program read that configuration file from one location (or a
 small number of locations), and make those locations well-known in the
 documentation of the program.
Python's standard library has the ‘configparser’ module, which is one
possible implementation of this.
-- 
 \ “I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept |
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Ben Finney