I think matching on the shortest unique prefix is common for command line parsers in general, not just argparse. I believe optparse did this too, and even the venerable getopt does! I think all this originated in the original (non-Python) GNU standard for long option parsing. All that probably explains why the docs hardly touch upon it. As to why parse_known_args also does this, I can see the reasoning behind this behavior: to the end user, "--sync" is a valid option, so it would be surprising if it didn't get recognized under certain conditions. I suppose you were badly bitten by this recently? Can you tell us more about what happened? On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
argparse does prefix matching as long as there are no conflicts. For example:
argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser() argparser.add_argument('--sync-foo', action='store_true') args = argparser.parse_args()
If I pass "--sync" to this script, it recognizes it as "--sync-foo". This behavior is quite surprising although I can see the motivation for it. At the very least it should be much more explicitly documented (AFAICS it's barely mentioned in the docs).
If there's another argument registered, say "--sync-bar" the above will fail due to a conflict.
Now comes the nasty part. When using "parse_known_args" instead of "parse_args", the above happens too - --sync is recognized for --sync-foo and captured by the parser. But this is wrong! The whole idea of parse_known_args is to parse the known args, leaving unknowns alone. This prefix matching harms more than it helps here because maybe the program we're actually acting as a front-end for (and hence using parse_known_args) knows about --sync and wants to get it.
Unless I'm missing something, this is a bug. But I'm also not sure whether we can do anything about it at this point, as existing code *may* be relying on it. The right thing to do would be to disable this prefix matching when parse_known_args is called.
Again, at the very least this should be documented (for parse_known_args not less than a warning box, IMHO).
Eli
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