Announcing argparse 0.2 ----------------------- argparse home: http://argparse.python-hosting.com/ argparse single module download: http://argparse.python-hosting.com/file/trunk/argparse.py?format=raw argparse bundled downloads at PyPI: http://www.python.org/pypi/argparse/ About this release ================== This release fixes a few minor bugs, modifies the 'store_true' and 'store_false' actions to have more natural defaults, and adds an epilog= keyword argument to ArgumentParser for text to be printed after the help messages. (The latter is in line with the `updates to optparse`_ for Python 2.5.) .. _updates to optparse: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5/whatsnew/modules.html New in this release =================== * The 'store_true' action's default is now False (instead of None). * The 'store_false' action's default is now True (instead of None). * ArgumentParser objects now accept an epilog= keyword argument. About argparse ============== The argparse module is an optparse-inspired command line parser that improves on optparse by: * handling both optional and positional arguments * supporting parsers that dispatch to sub-parsers * producing more informative usage messages * supporting actions that consume any number of command-line args * allowing types and actions to be specified with simple callables instead of hacking class attributes like STORE_ACTIONS or CHECK_METHODS as well as including a number of other more minor improvements on the optparse API. To whet your appetite, here's a simple program that sums its command-line arguments and writes them to a file:: parser = argparse.ArgumentParser() parser.add_argument('integers', type=int, nargs='+') parser.add_argument('--log', type='outfile', default=sys.stdout) args = parser.parse_args() args.log.write('%s\n' % sum(args.integers)) args.log.close()