Yes, I know. My function just sees '1', but I think it should see '1 2 3' so that it can figure out what to do. That's impossible (well, impossible without saving state between calls) when it sees the arguments piecemeal. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 24, 2014, at 9:42 PM, paul j3 <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> paul j3 added the comment:
> 
> Note that 
> 
>    '-t 1 2 3'.split()
> 
> becomes
> 
>    ['-t', '1', '2', '3']
> 
> Your 'type' function sees those 3 strings individually.  Try printing 'string' the first thing in your function to see what we mean.
> 
> ----------
> nosy: +paul.j3
> 
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> <http://bugs.python.org/issue22049>
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