Get varying amout of values from argparse

Question

I want to pars a color value from the command line. The color can either come as a RGB value or a RGBA value. Is it possible to tell argparse to get either the 3 or 4 next values or will I just have to take the remaining values and check that it is either 3 or 4 values or else print some sort of error to the user?

Answer 1

did you take a look at argparse?

https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/argparse.html

The example is actually rather fitting for your case

this program:

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Process some integers.')
parser.add_argument('integers', metavar='N', type=int, nargs='+',
                   help='an integer for the accumulator')
parser.add_argument('--sum', dest='accumulate', action='store_const',
                   const=sum, default=max,
                   help='sum the integers (default: find the max)')

args = parser.parse_args()
print(args.accumulate(args.integers))

takes integers as input, you should be able to use this?