argparse 1.0 - Command-line parsing library
Steven Bethard
steven.bethard at gmail.com
Sun Jul 26 19:14:02 CEST 2009
=======================
Announcing argparse 1.0
=======================
The argparse module provides an easy, declarative interface for
creating command line tools, which knows how to:
* parse the arguments and flags from sys.argv
* convert arg strings into objects for your program
* format and print informative help messages
* and much more...
The argparse module improves on the standard library optparse module
in a number of ways including:
* handling positional arguments
* supporting sub-commands
* allowing alternative option prefixes like + and /
* handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments
* producing more informative usage messages
* providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions
Download argparse
=================
The argparse homepage has links for source, MSI and single file
distributions of argparse:
http://code.google.com/p/argparse/
About this release
==================
This release includes a number of new features:
* Support for Python versions 2.3 through 3.1. No need to run 2to3 or
anything like that -- the argparse source code is both fully 2.X
and 3.X compatible.
* ``ArgumentParser`` grew a ``parse_known_args`` method which works
like ``parse_args`` but collects unrecognized arguments into a list
instead of raising an exception
* The ``ArgumentParser`` constructor accepts a new parameter for
reading additional arguments from files. For example,
``fromfile_prefix_chars='@'`` means that arguments like ``@file``
should be replaced by the arguments read from the given file.
* A new formatter class, ``ArgumentsDefaultHelpFormatter`` is
available, which will automatically add ``(default: %(default)s)``
to all argument help messages
* The ``metavar`` parameter to ``add_argument`` now accepts a tuple
of strings in additional to a single string so that more than one
name can be specified.
* The ``add_subparsers`` method now accepts ``title`` and
``description`` parameters which will cause it to display like an
argument group in help messages.
More information about the Python-announce-list
mailing list