More Command-Line Goodness

In Command-Line Applications, we looked at a Python main-import switch which boiled down to this.


for file in args.file: 
    with open( file, "r" ) as source:
        process_file( source, args )

The point was that each distinct file on the command-line was processed in a more-or-less uniform way by a single function that does the "real work" for that input file.

It turns out that we often have flat files which are spreadsheets or spreadsheet-like.   Indeed, for some people (and some organizations) the spreadsheet is their preferred user interface.  As I've said before, 

Spreadsheets are the universal user interface. Everyone likes them, they're almost inescapable. And they work. There's no reason to attempt to replace the spreadsheet with a web page or a form or a desktop application. It's easier to cope with spreadsheet vagaries than to replace them.

They have problems, but they are surprisingly common.  

Enter Stingray Reader.  This is a small Python library to make it easy to have programs which read workbooks--collections of spreadsheets--or spreadsheet-like files with a degree of transparency.  

And.  It allows a clean command-line interface.

With a little care, we can reduce the main-import switch to something like this.

if __name__ == "__main__":

    logging.basicConfig( stream=sys.stderr )

    args= parse_args()

    logging.getLogger().setLevel( args.verbosity )

    builder= make_builder( args )

    try:

        for file in args:

            with workbook.open_workbook( input ) as source:

                process_workbook( source, builder )

        status= 0

    except Exception as e:

        logging.exception( e )

        status= 3

    logging.shutdown()

    sys.exit( status )

The bold lines are specific to workbook ("spreadsheet") processing.  A "builder" creates application-specific Python objects from spreadsheet rows.  The "workbook.open_workbook" is a function that builds a workbook reader based on the file name.  It can handle a number of file types.  

The process_workbook function is the "real work" function that handles a workbook of individual spreadsheets (or a spreadsheet-like file).