======================= Announcing argparse 1.0 ======================= The argparse module provides an easy, declarative interface for creating command line tools, which knows how to: * parse the arguments and flags from sys.argv * convert arg strings into objects for your program * format and print informative help messages * and much more... The argparse module improves on the standard library optparse module in a number of ways including: * handling positional arguments * supporting sub-commands * allowing alternative option prefixes like + and / * handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments * producing more informative usage messages * providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions Download argparse ================= The argparse homepage has links for source, MSI and single file distributions of argparse: http://code.google.com/p/argparse/ About this release ================== This release includes a number of new features: * Support for Python versions 2.3 through 3.1. No need to run 2to3 or anything like that -- the argparse source code is both fully 2.X and 3.X compatible. * ``ArgumentParser`` grew a ``parse_known_args`` method which works like ``parse_args`` but collects unrecognized arguments into a list instead of raising an exception * The ``ArgumentParser`` constructor accepts a new parameter for reading additional arguments from files. For example, ``fromfile_prefix_chars='@'`` means that arguments like ``@file`` should be replaced by the arguments read from the given file. * A new formatter class, ``ArgumentsDefaultHelpFormatter`` is available, which will automatically add ``(default: %(default)s)`` to all argument help messages * The ``metavar`` parameter to ``add_argument`` now accepts a tuple of strings in additional to a single string so that more than one name can be specified. * The ``add_subparsers`` method now accepts ``title`` and ``description`` parameters which will cause it to display like an argument group in help messages.