Support Bash Arrays

[wahrwolf]

Hi there, I love fire but I keep running in the same issue.

A lot of my scripts support a target directive so I can handover a list and it will iterate over the list.

If I combine that with Fire I need to write ugly python lists and can not use bash magic. E.g. I need to write python example.py count_lines '["file00", "file01", "file02"...]' instead of something like 'python example.py count_lines "file{00..10}"` and I can not use any tab completion.

My current workaround is adding:

def count_lines(files):
  if isinstance(files, str):
    files = files.split()
  ...

One idea was to add this line with a special param like --use-bash-arrays to the Fire parser so I can run the script like: python example.py count_lines "ffiles{00..}" -- --use-bash-arrays

[siddharths2710]

Hello @dbieber and @wahrwolf , I would like to contribute to this enhancement, and to this end, I'd like to discuss how to resolve this issue. With the --use-bash-arrays parameter proposed by @wahrwolf , I have the following questions:

• How can we infer the element type in the bash array? One solution that comes to mind is through another parameter which serves the purpose, ex. --bash-array-elem-type=str
• Introducing a new command line parameter would mean to handle a similar named function argument in the Python code. For instance, ( although unlikely ) , the count_lines function may define a use-bash-arrays variable as a parameter in its signature. Any mechanism of handling this occurrence?
  • A Bash array may also be specified like ( f1 f2 f3 ... ) . Should we accommodate such a declaration as well?