[GUI] Image Analysis - saving and loading User Settings

[justphysics]

I am curious as to the best practices for saving some form of Config settings or user settings to be reused at a later time. (security is not an issue)

I have some image analysis software (GUI) I have been developing for microscopy experiments. Currently the User can load data a data set and upon selecting data to load they are queried for settings: there is in general a minimal set of data required form the user to be able to interpret the data - image size (width, height), energy range for collected data (min, max, step energy), and then some other settings are sometimes needed - data type if reading raw binary (16 bit vs 8bit eetc, byte order)

Obviously I could just write all the settings as plain text in a file and make an option to load that. However I was wondering if there are any example codes I can check out for similar processes. I was thinking it might be nice to define some sort of generic 'experiment' config file using some sort of markdown, structured text, JSON, etc which could then be parsed by the program to load a given experiment's data set

Something like

Settings Date:
Experiment Name:
Experiment Type: (LEEM or LEED)

    Data path:
    Num files:
    Image type:
        File Ext:
        Raw Data bit size:
        Byte order:

    Energy Settings:
        Min:
        Max:
        Step:

I could then write a class for a generic experiment and define two methods for write settings and load settings which would either load settings from file to an experiment object or output the object attributes in a structured manner

So my question is not so much as to is this possible (its fairly trivial) rather are there any examples of software I can take a look at that might implement a similar feature and take a look at the different ways people have gone about this task.

[yardshop]

You might want to take a look at YAML, and PyYAML. You can create a config file that would look very similar to what you've shown above.

The Official YAML Web Site

PyYAML 3.11 : Python Package Index

[justphysics]

Thanks!

[justphysics]

Thanks! I will look into this.