To interactively test my python script, I would like to create a Namespace
object, similar to what would be returned by argparse.parse_args()
.
The obvious way,
>>> import argparse
>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.parse_args()
Namespace()
>>> parser.parse_args("-a")
usage: [-h]
: error: unrecognized arguments: - a
Process Python exited abnormally with code 2
may result in Python repl exiting (as above) on a silly error.
So, what is the easiest way to create a Python namespace with a given set of attributes?
E.g., I can create a dict
on the fly (dict([("a",1),("b","c")])
) but I cannot use it as a Namespace
:
AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'a'
You can create a simple class:
class Namespace:
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
self.__dict__.update(kwargs)
and it'll work the exact same way as the argparse
Namespace
class when it comes to attributes:
>>> args = Namespace(a=1, b='c')
>>> args.a
1
>>> args.b
'c'
Alternatively, just import the class; it is available from the argparse
module:
from argparse import Namespace
args = Namespace(a=1, b='c')
As of Python 3.3, there is also types.SimpleNamespace
, which essentially does the same thing:
>>> from types import SimpleNamespace
>>> args = SimpleNamespace(a=1, b='c')
>>> args.a
1
>>> args.b
'c'
The two types are distinct; SimpleNamespace
is primarily used for the sys.implementation
attribute and the return value of time.get_clock_info()
.
Further comparisons:
instance_a == instance_b
is true if they have the same attributes with the same values.__repr__
to show what attributes they have.Namespace()
objects support containment testing; 'attrname' in instance
is true if the namespace instance has an attribute namend attrname
. SimpleNamespace
does not.Namespace()
objects have an undocumented ._get_kwargs()
method that returns a sorted list of (name, value)
attributes for that instance. You can get the same for either class using sorted(vars(instance).items())
.SimpleNamespace()
is implemented in C and Namespace()
is implemented in Python, attribute access is no faster because both use the same __dict__
storage for the attributes. Equality testing and producing the representation are a little faster for SimpleNamespace()
instances.