Cross-platform CLI file input with wildcards

test-cli-wildcard.py

import sys
import os
import glob
import platform
import codecs
import argparse

# Create parser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
    description="Test CLI input with wildcards, multiple platforms")

def parseCommandLine():
    """Parse command line"""
    # Add arguments
    parser.add_argument('filesIn',
                        action="store",
                        type=str,
                        nargs='+',
                        help="input file(s) (wildcards allowed)")
    # Parse arguments
    args = parser.parse_args()

    return args

def main():
    """Main command line application"""

    global out
    global err

    out = codecs.getwriter("UTF-8")(sys.stdout.buffer)
    err = codecs.getwriter("UTF-8")(sys.stderr.buffer)

    # Get input from command line
    args = parseCommandLine()

    # In Linux this works for wildcard expressions (but in Windows this is only a string!)
    if platform.system() == "Windows":
        # Windows doesn't natively handle wildcard expansion, so we need to do it ourselves
        filesIn = glob.glob(args.filesIn[0])
    else:
        # In Linux the OS takes care of the wildcard expansion
        filesIn = args.filesIn

    print(filesIn)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()