Allow combining short arguments in CLI argument parser #25
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beginner task
A good way to become a developer
enhancement
New feature or request
help wanted
Extra attention is needed
Here is a little task for anyone interested in helping. Our current implementation does not allow combining the single-hyphen arguments like
into
covert enc -Arrp recipient1 recipient2
as might be excepted of standard UNIX practices. Have a look at the current implementation and get hacking :)
We no longer use the Python
argparse
module due to its many limitations that affect usability but the custom parser is quite simple and it should be easy to add this functionality. Usability is very important and these details make it a bit easier to accomplish common tasks.Long arguments like
--recipient
are not to be combined, and any args taking parameters (like-r
but unlike-A
and-p
) should consume eachargv
element directly following them as argument parameters rather than as other arguments, even if those begin with hyphens. The other common form used in some UNIX tools-rrecipient1
is not to be supported. Separation by space keeps it simple and clean, and works better with tab completion of filenames.If further interested and if you are familiar with
pytest
, add tests for the argument parsing intests/test_cli_arguments.py
Any help on this or other details is highly appreciated and your name will be mentioned in the release notes.
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