Yaml and Json are the simplest and most commonly used file formats to store settings/config. PyYaml can be used to parse yaml. Json is already part of python from 2.5. Yaml is a superset of Json. Json will solve most uses cases except multi line strings where escaping is required. Yaml takes care of these cases too.
>>> import json
>>> config = {'handler' : 'adminhandler.py', 'timeoutsec' : 5 }
>>> json.dump(config, open('/tmp/config.json', 'w'))
>>> json.load(open('/tmp/config.json'))
{u'handler': u'adminhandler.py', u'timeoutsec': 5}