Automatically Type Cast Parameters In Python

Question

Background:
I mostly run python scripts from the command line in pipelines and so my arguments are always strings that need to be type casted to the app

Answer 1

I know I arrived late at this game, but how about eval?

def my_cast(a):
try:
    return eval(a)
except:
    return a

or alternatively (and more safely):

from ast import literal_eval

def mycast(a):
  try:
    return literal_eval(a)
  except:
    return a