[New-bugs-announce] [issue9399] Provide a 'print' action for argparse

[Dennis Malcorps]

New submission from Dennis Malcorps <dennis.malcorps at googlemail.com>:

Currently argparse has a 'version' action which can be triggered by user defined options which prints out a custom string.

parser.add_argument("--version", action="version", version="test 1.2.3")

Since the 'version' action can be added multiple times, it can be used to output different kinds of information, like the program's license.

parser.add_argument("--license", action="version", version="This file is licensed under GPL.... [a huge amount of text]")

The only drawback is that linebreaks are substituted with a normal space. So I propose a 'print' action (perhaps as a replacement for 'version'?) which respects whitespace characters.

parser.add_argument("--version", action="print", message="test 1.2.3")
parser.add_argument("--license", action="print", message="This file is licensed under GPL.... [a huge amount of text, now properly formatted!]")
parser.add_argument("--insult-me", action="print", message="You sick *peep* , *peep* yourself in *peep*")

Currently, the only solution is to create a custom action which is IMHO a bit overkill for just printing a simple string to stdout.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 111824
nosy: travistouchdown
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Provide a 'print' action for argparse
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue9399>
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