Columbo

Specify a dynamic set of questions to ask a user and get their answers.

columbo's feature set allows a program to:

• Ask multiple types of questions:
  • Yes or No
  • Multiple choice
  • Open-ended
• Validate the response provided by the user.
• Use answers from earlier questions:
  • As part of the text of a question
  • As part of the text of a default value
  • To decide if a question should be skipped
• Accept answers from the command line in addition to prompting the user.

Example

User Prompts

The primary use of columbo is to define a sequence of interactions that are used to prompt a user to provide answers using a terminal. Below is a sample which shows some ways this can be used.

import columbo

interactions = [
    columbo.Echo("Welcome to the Columbo example"),
    columbo.Acknowledge(
        "Press enter to start"
    ),
    columbo.BasicQuestion(
        "user",
        "What is your name?",
        default="Patrick",
    ),
    columbo.BasicQuestion(
        "user_email",
        lambda answers: f"""What email address should be used to contact {answers["user"]}?""",
        default="me@example.com"
    ),
    columbo.Choice(
        "mood",
        "How are you feeling today?",
        options={
            "happy": "😀",
            "sad": "😢",
            "sleepy": "🥱",
            "confused": "🤔",
        },
        default="happy",
    ),
    columbo.Confirm("likes_dogs", "Do you like dogs?", default=True),
]

answers = columbo.get_answers(interactions)
print(answers)

Below shows the output when the user accepts the default values for most of the questions. The user provides a different value for the email and explicitly confirms that they like dogs.

Welcome to the Columbo example
Press enter to start
 
What is your name? [Patrick]:

What email address should be used to contact Patrick? [me@example.com]: patrick@example.com

How are you feeling today?
1 - 😀
2 - 😢
3 - 🥱
4 - 🤔
Enter the number of your choice [1]:

Do you like dogs? (Y/n): y

{'user': 'Patrick', 'user_email': 'patrick@example.com', 'mood': 'happy', 'likes_dogs': True}

Command Line Answers

In addition to the interactive prompts, columbo can also parse command line arguments for interactions. This is done by changing columbo.get_answers() to columbo.parse_args(). Below shows the output when using the same interactions from above.

$ python columbo_example.py --user-email patrick@example.com --likes-dogs
{'user': 'Patrick', 'user_email': 'patrick@example.com', 'mood': 'happy', 'likes_dogs': True}

The full example

import columbo

interactions = [
    columbo.Echo("Welcome to the Columbo example"),
    columbo.Acknowledge(
        "Press enter to start"
    ),
    columbo.BasicQuestion(
        "user",
        "What is your name?",
        default="Patrick",
    ),
    columbo.BasicQuestion(
        "user_email",
        lambda answers: f"""What email address should be used to contact {answers["user"]}?""",
        default="me@example.com"
    ),
    columbo.Choice(
        "mood",
        "How are you feeling today?",
        options=["happy", "sad", "sleepy", "confused"],
        default="happy",
    ),
    columbo.Confirm("likes_dogs", "Do you like dogs?", default=True),
]

answers = columbo.parse_args(interactions)
print(answers)

Documentation

Check out the project documentation.

For an overview on how repository structure and how to work with the code base, read the Development Guide.