I am migrating to Python 3.12, and finally have to remove the last distutils dependency.
I am using from distutils.util import strtobool to enforce that command-line arguments via argparse are in fact bool, properly taking care of NaN vs. False vs. True, like so:
arg_parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
arg_parser.add_argument("-r", "--rebuild_all", type=lambda x: bool(strtobool(x)), default=True)
So this question is actually twofold:
- What would be an alternative to the deprecated
strtobool? - Alternatively: What would be an even better solution to enforce ‘any string’ to be interpreted as
bool, in a safe way (e.g., to parse args)?
>Solution :
What about using argparse’s BooleanOptionalAction? This is documented in the argparse docs, but not in a way that provides me with a useful link.
That would look like:
arg_parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
arg_parser.add_argument("-r", "--rebuild-all", action=argparse.BooleanOptionalAction, default=True)
And it would allow you to pass either --rebuild-all or --no-rebuild-all. This gets you an option that can be either true or false, but without the hassle of having to parse a string into a boolean value.