type=dict in argparse.add_argument()

Question

I\'m trying to set up a dictionary as optional argument (using argparse); the following line is what I have so far:

parser.add_argument(\'-i\',\'--image\', t         


        

Answer 1

Here is a another solution since I had to do something similar myself. I use the ast module to convert the dictionary, which is input to the terminal as a string, to a dict. It is very simple.

Code snippet

Say the following is called test.py:

import argparse
import ast

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--params', '--p', help='dict of params ',type=str)

options = parser.parse_args()

my_dict = options.params
my_dict = ast.literal_eval(my_dict)
print(my_dict)
for k in my_dict:
  print(type(my_dict[k]))
  print(k,my_dict[k])

Then in the terminal/cmd line, you would write:

Running the code

python test.py --p '{"name": "Adam", "lr": 0.001, "betas": (0.9, 0.999)}'

Output

{'name': 'Adam', 'lr': 0.001, 'betas': (0.9, 0.999)}

name Adam

lr 0.001

betas (0.9, 0.999)