Yet Another Command Line Parser

[Manlio Perillo]

Regards.
In the standard library there are two modules for command line
parsing: optparse and getopt.
In the Python Cookbook there is another simple method for parsing,
using a docstring.

However sometimes (actually, in all my small scripts) one has a simple
function whose arguments are choosen on the command line.

For this reason I have written a simple module, optlist, that parses
the command line as it was a function's argument list.

It is more simple to post an example:


import optlist


def main(a, b, *args, **kwargs):
    print 'a =', a
    print 'b =', b

    print 'args:', args
    print 'kwargs:', kwargs

optlist.call(main)


And on the shell:
shell: script.py 10, 20, 100, x=1



Since sometimes one needs to keep the options, I have provided an
alternate syntax, here is an example:


import optlist

optlist.setup('a, b, *args, **kwargs')

print 'a =', optlist.a
print 'b =', optlist.b

print 'args:', optlist.args
print 'kwargs:', optlist.kwargs



Finally, the module is so small that I post it here:

-------------------------- optlist.py --------------------------------

import sys

# add spaces to avoids errors like: 1 2, 3 4 -> (12, 34)
_options = ' '.join(sys.argv[1:])

def call(func):
    """
    Call func, passing to it the arguments from the command line
    """
    exec('func(' + _options + ')')
        
def setup(template):
    """
    Template is a string containing the argument list.
    The command line options are evaluated according to the template
    and the values are stored in the module dictionary
    """
    exec('def helper(' + template +
'):\n\tglobals().update(locals())')
    exec('helper(' + _options + ')')

----------------------------------------------------------------------



I hope that this is not 'Yet Another Unuseful Module' and that the
code is correct.

The only problem is that error messages are ugly.



Regards   Manlio Perillo