optfunc-ysimonson 0.1

Generate commandline flags from function arguments.

optfunc
=======

optfunc uses introspection to make a Python function available as a command
line utility. It's syntactic sugar around optparse from the standard library.

Here's what the API looks like:

import optfunc

def upper(filename, verbose = False):
"Usage: %prog <file> [--verbose] - output file content in uppercase"
s = open(filename).read()
if verbose:
print "Processing %s bytes..." % len(s)
print s.upper()

if __name__ == '__main__':
optfunc.run(upper)

And here's the resulting command-line interface:

$ ./demo.py --help
Usage: demo.py <file> [--verbose] - output file content in uppercase

Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-v, --verbose
$ ./demo.py README.md
OPTFUNC
...
$ ./demo.py README.md -v
Processing 2049 bytes...
OPTFUNC
...

How arguments work
------------------

Non-keyword arguments are treated as required arguments - optfunc.run will
throw an error if they number of arguments provided on the command line
doesn't match the number expected by the function (unless @notstrict is used,
see below).

Keyword arguments with defaults are treated as options. At the moment, only
string and boolean arguments are supported. Other types are planned.

Consider the following:

def geocode(s, api_key='', geocoder='google', list_geocoders=False):

's' is a required argument. api_key, geocoder and list_geocoders are all
options, with defaults provided. Since list_geocoders has a boolean as its
default it will be treated slightly differently (in optparse terms, it will
store True if the flag is provided on the command line and False otherwise).

The command line options are derived from the parameter names like so:

Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-l, --list-geocoders
-a API_KEY, --api-key=API_KEY
-g GEOCODER, --geocoder=GEOCODER

Note that the boolean --list-geocoders is a flag, not an option that sets a
value.

The short option is derived from the first letter of the parameter. If that
character is already in use, the second character will be used and so on.

The long option is the full name of the parameter with underscores converted
to hyphens.

If you want complete control over the name of the options, simply name your
parameter as follows:

def foo(q_custom_name=False):

This will result in a short option of -q and a long option of --custom-name.

Special arguments
-----------------

Arguments with the names 'stdin', 'stdout' or 'stderr' will be automatically
passed the relevant Python objects, for example:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# upper.py
import optfunc

@optfunc.main
def upper_stdin(stdin, stdout):
stdout.write(stdin.read().upper())

Does the following:

$ echo "Hello, world" | ./upper.py
HELLO, WORLD

Subcommands
-----------

Some command line applications feature subcommands, with the first argument
to the application indicating which subcommand should be executed.

optfunc has the beginnings of support for this - you can pass an array of
functions to the optfunc.run() and the names of the functions will be used
to select a subcommand based on the first argument:

import optfunc

def one(arg):
print "One: %s" % arg

def two(arg):
print "Two: %s" % arg

def three(arg):
print "Three: %s" % arg

if __name__ == '__main__':
optfunc.run([one, two, three])

Usage looks like this:

$ ./subcommands_demo.py
Unknown command: try 'one', 'two' or 'three'
$ ./subcommands_demo.py one
one: Required 1 arguments, got 0
$ ./subcommands_demo.py two arg
Two: arg

This approach is limited in that help can be provided for an individual option
but not for the application as a whole. If anyone knows how to get optparse to
handle the subcommand pattern please let me know.

Decorators
----------

optfunc also supports two decorators for extra functionality:

@optfunc.notstrict
@optfunc.arghelp('list_geocoders', 'list available geocoders and exit')
def geocode(s, api_key='', geocoder='google', list_geocoders=False):
# ...

@notstrict means "don't throw an error if one of the required positional
arguments is missing" - in the above example we use this because we still want
the list_geocoders argument to work even if a string has not been provided.

@arghelp('arg-name', 'help text') allows you to provide help on individual
arguments, which will then be displayed when --help is called.