Comma separated inputs instead of space separated inputs for argparse

Question

I\'m using argparse to receive inputs from the command line to run my script.

My current input string looks like this:

path> python &         


        

Answer 1

Here this comma-separated input is actually a different type. All you have to is to define the type. Here I define a custom type that does it.

class DelimiterSeperatedInput:
  def __init__(self, item_type, separator=','):
    self.item_type = item_type
    self.separator = separator

  def __call__(self, value):
    values = []
    try:
      for val in value.split(self.separator):
         typed_value = self.item_type(val)
         values.append(typed_value)
    except Exception:
      raise ArgumentError("%s is not a valid argument" % value)
    return values

parser.add_argument('-t', type=DelimiterSeperatedInput(str),
                    help='comma separated string values')
parser.add_argument('-f', type=DelimiterSeperatedInput(float, ":"), 
                    help="colon separated floats')

This code may not work as-is, you might have to fix. But it was to give an idea.

Note: I could reduce the __call__ function body by using list, map etc. But then it wouldn't be very readable. Once you get the idea, you can do kinds of stuff with it.