[New-bugs-announce] [issue23159] argparse: Provide equivalent of optparse.OptionParser.{option_groups, option_list, get_option}

Eric McDonald report at bugs.python.org
Sun Jan 4 08:07:43 CET 2015


New submission from Eric McDonald:

There are several use cases for having the equivalent of the optparse.OptionParser 'get_option' method and the 'option_groups' and 'option_list' properties in argparse.ArgumentParser class.

(1) Easy alteration of the text of the default help option. With optparse, one could write:

>>> oparser.get_option( "-h" ).help
'show this help message and exit'
>>> oparser.get_option( "-h" ).help = "Show this help message and exit."
>>> oparser.get_option( "-h" ).help
'Show this help message and exit.'

The equivalent facility does not appear to exist in argparse. (Issue #19462, http://bugs.python.org/issue19462, is about a different use case. And, while https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#add-help suggests a workaround with add_help=False and then creating a new option with the 'help' action, it is still less convenient than altering the existing help option.)

(2) Inspection of all the argument declarations in an ArgumentParser object after it has been populated. This is particularly useful if you want to look for the equivalent of the available options in config files and don't want to have write explicit code which separately enumerates the available config file keys and how to handle them. With an OptionParser, one could use the 'option_groups' attribute to find all option groups (to correspond to config file sections) and the 'option_list' attribute to find all options (to correspond to config file keys); these are all part of the published interface and provide relatively simple data types to inspect. With an Argument Parser, one needs to rely upon the unpublished interface (the '_actions' attribute of a parser, etc...).

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 233394
nosy: emcd
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: argparse: Provide equivalent of optparse.OptionParser.{option_groups,option_list,get_option}
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue23159>
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