argparse argument post-processing

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2023 at 22:31, Dom Grigonis via Python-list
<python-list at python.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I have a situation, maybe someone can give some insight.
>
> Say I want to have input which is comma separated array (e.g. paths='path1,path2,path3') and convert it to the desired output - list:

This is a single argument.

> Now the second case. I want input to be space separated array - bash array. And I want space-separated string returned. My current approach is:
> import argparse
> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
> parser.add_argument('paths', nargs='+')
> args = parser.parse_args()
> paths = ' '.join(args.paths)
> But what I am looking for is a way to do this, which is intrinsic to `argparse` module. Reason being I have a fair amount of such cases and I don’t want to do post-processing, where post-post-processing happens (after `parser.parse_args()`).
>

This is parsing multiple arguments.

If you want it space-separated, you can do that, just as a single
argument. Otherwise, what you're doing is taking multiple arguments
and joining them. I'm not sure what you expect to see, but your
examples here pretty clearly show that you are taking multiple
arguments, and joining them with spaces.

ChrisA