ansible-playbook --limit more than one host?

The same Common patters apply to the command-line option -l. Quoting the note:

"You can use either a comma (,) or a colon (:) to separate a list of hosts. The comma is preferred when dealing with ranges and IPv6 addresses."

For example, given the inventory

shell> cat hosts
[webservers]
test_01
test_02

[dbservers]
test_03
test_04

and the playbook

shell> cat pb.yml 
- hosts: all
  tasks:
    - debug:
        var: inventory_hostname

The various host's patterns work as expected. For example

1. All hosts in webservers plus all hosts in dbservers

shell> ansible-playbook -i hosts pb.yml -l webservers:dbservers
...
ok: [test_01] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_01
ok: [test_02] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_02
ok: [test_03] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_03
ok: [test_04] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_04

2. The hosts test_02 and test_04

shell> ansible-playbook -i hosts pb.yml  -l test_02,test_04

ok: [test_02] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_02
ok: [test_04] => 
  inventory_hostname: test_04

3. All hosts in webservers except the host test_02

shell> ansible-playbook -i hosts pb.yml  -l webservers:\!test_02

  inventory_hostname: test_01

I was spacing out and at the time I totally thought I could just list out all the hosts inline and ansible-playbook would understand.

I fixed my issue by simply adding -l before each host name in the command.

(I realize this might not be a 'best practice')

My final command looked something like:

ansible-playbook -i /path/to/my/inventory/file.ini -l server.1.com -l server.2.com my-playbook.yml --check --diff