Python argparse dict arg

Question

I want to receive a dict(str -> str) argument from the command line. Does argparse.ArgumentParser provide it? Or any other library?

For the

Answer 1

As for the current libraries like argparse, docopt and click, none of them support using dict args. The best solution I can think of is to make a custom argparse.Action to support it youself:

import argparse

class MyAction(argparse.Action):
    def __init__(self, option_strings, dest, nargs=None, **kwargs):
        super(MyAction, self).__init__(option_strings, dest, nargs, **kwargs)

    def __call__(self, parser, namespace, values, option_string=None):
        print '%r %r %r' % (namespace, values, option_string)
        value_dict = {}
        values.reverse()
        while len(values) > 0:
            v = eval(values.pop()).lstrip('--') # This is like crazy hack, I know.
            k = eval(values.pop())
            value_dict[k] = v

        setattr(namespace, self.dest, value_dict)

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-d', action=MyAction, nargs='*')
args = parser.parse_args('-d "--key" "key1" "--value" "val1" "--key" "key2" "--value" "val2"'.split())

print(args)