CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncommand-line-arguments
pavpanchekha
pavpanchekha

Reputation: 2093

And odd command-line interface to parse arguments for

I've got a command line interface for a Python program that has a bunch of options (say, --a, --b, --c) but one switches between commands with other switches.

So, perhaps prog -S a b c invokes the -S action, and prog -Y a b c invokes the -Y action. prog -Y a b c --a=2 --b=3, then, should invoke the -Y action with parameters a and b and positional argument a, b, c

Is there any way to make argparse or getopt do the argument parsing for me? Is there some other library to do this nicely?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 126

Answers (2)

John
John

Reputation: 11

I'm not entirely sure if this will help, but so far, I have been writing a wrapper that takes arguments from XML set by a web interface, and then passes them into the command:

Obviously takes more complicated argument strings, but for the sake of an example: 

 def __main__():
 parser = optparse.OptionParser()
 parser.add_option( '-Q', '--ibmax', dest='ibmax', help='' )
 (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
 if options.ibmax != 'None' and int( options.ibmax ) >= 1:
                ibmax = '--bmax %s' % options.ibmax

 cmd1 = Popen([another.py, '-Q "%s"' % (options.ibmax),], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0]
 process = subprocess.Popen(cmd1, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

Depending on certain flags in my web interface, more options are added to the arg list and thus a different command is run. Add every command option to the parser and then check the value of the -Y or -S command to set vars and change which command you need to pass.

I hope this helps, I'm no python pro, this just works for me.

Upvotes: 1

jcollado
jcollado

Reputation: 40374

I think using argparse's subcommands would be useful in this case.

Basically you can create a main parser that takes care of the parsing of the subcommand together with some common general options and then a few subparsers (one for each subcommand) that take care of the parsing of the specific options passed to the subcommands.

Upvotes: 3

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