Parsing a Fortigate config file with Python

Question

I am basically trying to continue this unanswered question about parsing a fortigate config file.

Reading a fortigate configuration file with Python

The root problem is that this config contains a number of records like this,

edit 1
    set srcintf "port26"
    set dstintf "port25"
        set srcaddr "all"             
        set dstaddr "all"             
    set action accept
    set utm-status enable
    set schedule "always"
        set service "ANY"             
    set av-profile "default"
    set nat enable
    set central-nat enable
next

I would like to get the output for each acl on a single line so I can import them into a CSV. The problem is that each record can have a variable number of lines, and the indentation shows subsections of the preceding line. The other post does get some of it correctly, but it doesn't handle the indentation. I have come up with some workarounds that replace white spaces with arbitrary characters, but I didn't know if there was a method to read the number tabs/whitespaces and use that to indicate positioning.

Thanks

Answer 1

So I have managed to read your text and turn it into a dictionary in python. It is pretty simple. You basically have to do something along the lines of:

conFigFile=open('./config.txt')

data=dict()
record=0

for line in conFigFile:
    if line.find('edit')>=0:
        record=int(line.replace('edit',''))
        data[record]={}
    if line.find('set')>=0:
        line=line.replace('set','')
        line=line.strip()
        print line
        key,val=line.split(' ')
        data[record][key]=val
conFigFile.close()

This will produce a dictionary which will then allow you to make calls such as:

>>> data[1]['nat']
'enable'
>>> data[1].keys()
['nat', 'service', 'schedule', 'central-nat', 'srcaddr', 'av-profile', 'dstintf', 'srcintf', 'action', 'dstaddr', 'utm-status']

So now it is possible to generate a csv file:

csvFile=open('./data.csv','w')
records=data.keys()
for record in records:
    values=data[record].keys()
    valList=['Record',str(record)]
    for val in values:
        valList.append(val)
        valList.append(data[record][val])
    csvFile.write(",".join(valList))
csvFile.close()

Which produces the csv file:

Record,1,nat,enable,service,"ANY",schedule,"always",central-nat,enable,srcaddr,"all",av-profile,"default",dstintf,"port25",srcintf,"port26",action,accept,dstaddr,"all",utm-status,enable

If you really want to count the spaces before the line, you can do something like the following:

>>> a='     test: one     '
>>> a.count(' ') #count all spaces
11
>>> (len(a) - len(a.lstrip())) #count leading spaces
5