Configuration Parser

The ConfigParser is an optional class to help separate your code for experimental configurations by using YAML files for configuration. This imposes very few restrictions on the way you set up your configuration files; it mostly makes it easier to access their contents and save the configuration parameters with your data using the Logger.

This is useful for managing both values that are fixed through all experiments (e.g., dimensions of the arena) and experimental values that vary between conditions (e.g., number of robots). The latter may be saved as an array and a single value used for different conditions.

While the ConfigParser can load any valid YAML files, the largest restriction is what configuration parameter types can be saved to log files. For details, see the log_config() documentation.

class gridsim.config_parser.ConfigParser(config_filename: str, show_warnings: bool = False)

Class to handle YAML configuration files.

This can be directly passed to the log_config() to save all configuration values with the trial data.

__init__(config_filename: str, show_warnings: bool = False)

Create a configuration parser to manage all of the parameters in a YAML configuration file.

Parameters

  • config_filename (str) – Location and filename of the YAML config file

  • show_warnings (bool) – Whether to print a warning if trying to get a value that returns None (useful for debugging), by default False.

get(key: Optional[str] = None, default: Any = None) → Any

Get a parameter value from the configuration, or get a dictionary of the parameters if no parameter name (key) is specified.

Note that if no default is specified and the key is not found in the configuration file, this will return None instead of rasing an exception.

Parameters

  • key (Optional[str], optional) – Name of the parameter to retrieve, by default None. If not specified, a dictionary of all parameters will be returned.

  • default (Any, optional) – Default value to return if the key is not found in the configuration, by default None.

Returns

Parameter value for the given key, or the default value is the key is not found. If no key is given, a dictionary of all parameters is returned.

Return type

Any