On Monday 27 June 2016 15:34, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: > On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 4:56:10 PM UTC+12, Sachin Garg wrote: > >> # Set verbose flag >> verbose = False >> if arguments['--verbose']: >> verbose = True >> elif arguments['-q']: >> verbose = False > > Don’t you just love code (and commenting) like this...
Not particularly, but what are you going to do? You need to support a minimum of three cases: - a default setting; - the case where the user passes --verbose; - the case where the user passes -q; (I'm not sure why --verbose take a long argument but no short argument -v; and likewise why there's a -q short argument but no --quiet long version. Oh well.) A simple test-and-set for each argument is the simplest, most straight-forward way of handling this. It's not *pretty* or *elegant* code, but it is the easiest to read, write and comprehend, and in my opinion much better than alternatives involving ever more arcane method calls to ever more complicated classes. I don't have experience with docutils and cannot judge whether or not Sachin's snippets are good or bad examples of use, but find myself going back to the good old fashioned GNU style command line parser whenever I need a few command line options. If you find yourself writing subparsers and "mandatory options" and needing entire help screens to describe single arguments (as in "foo --help arg") then really I think you should give up the pretence that you're dealing with command line options, and you should write a mini-language for your application. (hg, git, memcoder, soc etc. I'm talking about you.) -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
