[New-bugs-announce] [issue11708] argparse: suggestion for formatting optional positional args

[Peter Williams]

New submission from Peter Williams <pwil3058 at bigpond.net.au>:

At present, if a number (e.g. 2) of optional positional arguments
are defined (e.g. arg1 and arg2) argparse formats them as follows:

usage: program [arg1] [arg2]

in the usage message.  I would like to suggest that a better format would be:

usage: program [arg1 [arg2]]

as this more accurately reflects the way argparse treats them during parsing of the command line.

This formatting would be consistent with the way argparse currently formats a single optional positional argument with nargs='*', namely:

usage: program [arg [arg ...]]

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 132462
nosy: pwil3058
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: argparse: suggestion for formatting optional positional args
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue11708>
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