parsable

Parsable is a lightweight decorator-based command line parser library. Parsable was written to be simpler than argparse, optparse, and argh.

Installation

Install from PyPI with pip

pip install parsable

Or just download parsable/__init__.py and add to your project.

Usage

Parsable uses just two pieces of syntax: a @parsable command decorator, and a parsable() dispatch function.

Import parsable.
```
from parsable import parsable
```

Decorate functions you want parsed. Parsable inspects the function to decide how to parse arguments. Arguments without default values are parsed as strings. Default arguments of any type T can be parsed as long as T(some_string) can do the parsing.

@parsable
def my_function(required_arg, optional_bool=True, optional_int=1):
    '''Help messages are not just a good idea, they are required'''
    # parsable automatically converts types based on default arguments:
    assert isinstance(required_arg, str)
    assert isinstance(optional_string, bool)
    assert isinstance(optional_int, int)
    # ...

@parsable
def do_stuff_with_files(*filenames, inplace=True):
    '''This does something to each file'''
    # ...

Dispatch at the end of the script.

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parsable()

Use your new script

$ python my_script.py my_function demo optional_int=5
...

# parsable replaces - with _ to make functions easier to read
$ python my_script.py do-stuff-with-files *.py inplace=false
...

Advanced Usage

To show verbose information (commmand name and timing info), set the environment variable PARSABLE_VERBOSE=true.

If you use parsable for many modules in a package, you can collect them in your setup.py using parsable.find_entry_points().

from parsable import parsable
from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='my_package',
    entry_points=parsable.find_entry_points('my_package'),
    ...
)

LICENSE

Parsable is dual-licensed under the MIT and GPL2 licenses.

Metadata

Release files for parsable 0.3.5

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Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for parsable 0.3.5
File	Size	Uploaded	Provenance
parsable-0.3.5.tar.gz	5.3 kB	Apr 29, 2026	Without provenance	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for parsable 0.3.5
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
parsable-0.3.5-py3-none-any.whl 5.0 kB Apr 29, 2026 Without provenance	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 10.3 kB

Release files / parsable-0.3.5.tar.gz

Download URL	parsable-0.3.5.tar.gz
Size	5.3 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`b1aca04740de93aad990e94a448fa6a6ce2bae6828a9e37335cdf011f6677b61`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`6b002dd05fe1e04c2b03c185457bee0a2820e96aa5397b23abcc568a670a14eb`
Upload date	Apr 29, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.12`

Release files / parsable-0.3.5-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	parsable-0.3.5-py3-none-any.whl
Size	5.0 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`562a9f9411c9c871a5a38007a5f6570c5070aa51ccf3660d931bfe7eb89d079f`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`e7a67ea8893fc008461ebea5384f30b29d2478efd86c96e1423ddf3b3b51e08a`
Upload date	Apr 29, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/6.1.0 CPython/3.13.12`

Security for parsable 0.3.5

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