Summary
Announcing the first public release of plac, a declarative command line arguments parser designed for simplicity and concision.

I would like to announce to the world the first public release of plac:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plac

Plac is a wrapper over argparse and works in all versions of Python starting from Python 2.3 up to Python 3.1.

With blatant immodesty, plac claims to be the easiest to use command line arguments parser module in the Python world. Its goal is to reduce the learning curve of argparse from hours to minutes. It does so by removing the need to build a command line arguments parser by hand: actually it is smart enough to infer the parser from function annotations.

Here is a simple example (in Python 3) to whet your appetite:

$ cat example.py
def main(arg: "required argument"):
    "do something with arg"
    print('Got %s' % arg)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import plac; plac.call(main) # passes sys.argv[1:] to main

$ python example.py -h
usage: example.py [-h] arg

do something with arg

positional arguments:
  arg         required argument

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit


$ python example.py
usage: example.py [-h] arg
example.py: error: too few arguments

$  python example.py arg
Got arg

$  python example.py arg1 arg2
usage: example.py [-h] arg
example.py: error: unrecognized arguments: arg2

You can find in the documentation a lot of other simple and not so simple examples:

http://micheles.googlecode.com/hg/plac/doc/plac.html

Enjoy!

Michele Simionato

P.S. answering an unspoken question: yes, we really needed yet another command line arguments parser! ;)

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About the Blogger

Michele Simionato started his career as a Theoretical Physicist, working in Italy, France and the U.S. He turned to programming in 2003; since then he has been working professionally as a Python developer and now he lives in Milan, Italy. Michele is well known in the Python community for his posts in the newsgroup(s), his articles and his Open Source libraries and recipes. His interests include object oriented programming, functional programming, and in general programming metodologies that enable us to manage the complexity of modern software developement.