arglite

A lightweight, explicit argument parsing library for Python programs.

I made this for a teaching machine project I'm working on (I needed a custom argument parser for reasons), and I'm always too impatient to use argparse.

Installation

Find this tool on PyPI: pip install arglite

Usage

Declare the flags your program expects, then access them as attributes on the global parser:

import arglite

arglite.parser.require("name", type=str)
arglite.parser.optional("count", default=1, type=int)
arglite.parser.flag("verbose")

def main():
    print(arglite.parser.name)
    print(arglite.parser.count)
    print(arglite.parser.verbose)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Run it with:

python main.py --name Yo --count 5 --verbose

Declarations

parser.require(name, short=None, type=None) — required flag; exits with an error if missing.
parser.optional(name, short=None, default=None, type=None) — optional flag with an optional default value.
parser.flag(name, short=None) — boolean flag; True if present, otherwise False.

If short is not given, the first letter of the flag name is used automatically (e.g. --name can also be -n).

Accessing values

Declared flags are accessed directly on the parser:

arglite.parser.name
arglite.parser.count
arglite.parser.verbose

HELP!

Help appears when -h / --help is used.

Errors

When arguments are missing, unknown, or cannot be converted to the declared type, you'll see clear errors:

ERROR: --name is required but was not provided
ERROR: Unknown flag --foo; the program does not call for it
ERROR: Value for --count could not be converted to int: 'abc'

Notes

Flags are case-sensitive.
Both -f / --flag and --flag=value / -f=value syntaxes are supported.
Values containing spaces work when passed via the shell's normal quoting rules.
Empty string values (--name "") are preserved.
ast.literal_eval is used for type inference when no explicit type is given.

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