[New-bugs-announce] [issue15125] argparse: positional arguments containing - in name not handled well

[Nicu Stiurca]

New submission from Nicu Stiurca <supernic2002 at gmail.com>:

To reproduce, try the following code:
from argparse import ArgumentParser
a = ArgumentParser()
a.add_argument("foo-bar")
args = a.parse_args(["biz"])
print args, args.foo_bar

Expected output:
Namespace(foo_bar='biz') biz

Actual output:
Namespace(foo-bar='biz')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'Namespace' object has no attribute 'foo_bar'

Other comments:
The positional argument 'foo-bar' becomes impossible to retrieve without explicitly passing keyword argument dest='foo_bar'. Hyphens in positional arguments should be automatically replaced with underscores just as with other arguments.

I have not tested if this problem occurs in Python versions newer than 2.6.

----------
messages: 163340
nosy: nstiurca
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: argparse: positional arguments containing - in name not handled well
type: behavior
versions: Python 2.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue15125>
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