How to support custom types and typing?

[nh13]

I was trying to figure out from the docs how to support custom types (even pathlib's Path) as well as python's type hints. Any pointers would be very appreciated.

For type hints, it looks like the values after the colon (:) are being used by both clize and the typing library. I also want to use the typing library to indicate something is optional to the API, while also have it exposed with clize on the command line. For example:

from clize import run, Parameter
from typing import Optional

def double(*, number: ('n', Optional[int]) = 2):
    '''
    Doubles the number
    
    :param number: the number to double
    '''
    print(2 * number)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run(double)

[nh13]

Looks like a parser.value_converter will work here. It would be great to natively support any type who has a string constructor. Here's another interesting case:

from clize import run, Parameter

def double(*, number: ('n', int, Parameter.REQUIRED) = 2):
    '''
    Doubles the number
    
    :param number: the number to double
    '''
    print(2 * number)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run(double)

I would like a short flag n, the type to be an integer int, and the parameter to be required Parameter.REQUIRED. I get the following exception:

...
...python3.6/site-packages/clize/parser.py", line 165, in __init__
    super(ParameterWithSourceEquivalent, self).__init__(**kwargs)
TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'required'

But this works:

from clize import run, Parameter

def double(number: (int, Parameter.REQUIRED) = 2):
    '''
    Doubles the number
    
    :param number: the number to double
    '''
    print(2 * number)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run(double)

[bersace]

#24 may help

[mauvilsa]

You may want to try jsonargparse. It has a very extensive support for complex type hints including Optional. See in the docs type hints and basic-usage.

[epsy]

There is now rudimentary support for type annotations in Clize 5.0.0, but there is still a long way to go for it to be seamless: https://github.com/epsy/clize/blob/v5.0.0/examples/typed_cli.py