Here's a patch for 2.7 (based of the head of the 2.7 branch), something similar could be done for 3.4 (I wasn't sure what branch I was supposed to base the patch off, since 3.4 is inactive). The string requirement was already noted in the docstring of the configparser module, but that's not mentioned in the main docs. Also, I wasn't sure where to put a test in because there was not test_configparser.py located in Lib/test.