How do I commit changes to a text file on button press?

Question

I've written a small app that creates a GUI for setting up uShare. Currently it depends heavily on the 'w' (write) and 'a' (append) functions to generate/edit ushare.conf file. But I've been trying to find a way for the app to store all the changes until a save button is pressed, and only then committing them to the actual file. I think that would be the best way of getting around having the user press enter every time they change any field (and indeed allow for GtkCheckButton).

Answer 1

If you want to store configuration like this, what I recommend you do is to use the Python ConfigParser module. Please note you should ensure you store config files in ~/.config/<your-app-name>. You can store config like this:

import ConfigParser
import xdg.BaseDirectory

# set the configdir to ~/.config/ushare
configdir = os.path.join(xdg.BaseDirectory.xdg_config_home, "ushare")

# check if the dir exists and if not, create it
if not os.path.exists(configdir):
    os.makedirs(configdir)

# create configparser object
config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser()
cfile = os.path.join(configdir, "ushare.conf")

# add your config items - see the ConfigParser docs for how to do this

# later in your app add this when the user presses the button to save the config:

with open(cfile, 'wb') as configfile:
    config.write(configfile)

Please note: I didn't actually run this code and just wrote it here, but it should work fine.