Creating a Program

This is a basic example for generating a simple program with npdoc_cli.

The attribute cli is a pre-made instance of npdoc_cli.NumpyDocCLI for easy access across different modules. It is the access point for the module.

from npdoc_cli import cli

Build the CLI

First, define an entry point into the program by wrapping a method in cli.program() and document your function with type hinting and numpy style doc strings. When cli.build() is called, the function’s type hinting and doc strings will be parsed and converted into a command line interface.

@cli.program
def hello(name: str):
    """
    Say hello!

    Parameters
    ----------
    name : str
        Who is being greeted.
    """
    print('hello',name)

cli.build()
cli.print_help()

usage: hello [-h] name

Say hello!

positional arguments:
  name        Who is being greeted.

options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Dispatching to Functions

Calling cli.parse_args() will parse any command line arguments into an argparse namespace. Passing that through cli.dispatch() will route the arguments to the correct function.

Normally, we would call cli.parse_args() as empty to get the arguments from the command line that invoked the program. For this example, we pass our own arguments as a list. Calling cli.dispatch(args) will pass the arguments from the command line to the correct function.

args = cli.parse_args(['reader'])
cli.dispatch(args)

hello reader

The function is stored in the attribute args.__routine__, and can be accessed and called manually if desired.

args = cli.parse_args(['reader'])
print(args.__routine__)
args = vars(args)
func = args.pop('__routine__')
func(**args)

<function hello at 0x7f24ea53bba0>
hello reader