[issue9338] argparse optionals with nargs='+' can't be followed by positionals

[Steven Bethard]

New submission from Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com>:

[From the old argparse tracker: http://code.google.com/p/argparse/issues/detail?id=20]

You can't follow a nargs='+' optional argument with a positional argument:

>>> import argparse
>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='PROG')
>>> parser.add_argument('--badger', nargs='+')
>>> parser.add_argument('spam')
>>> parser.parse_args('--badger A B C D'.split())
usage: PROG [-h] [--badger BADGER [BADGER ...]] spam
PROG: error: too few arguments

Ideally, this should produce:

>>> parser.parse_args('--badger A B C D'.split())
Namespace(badger=['A', 'B', 'C'], spam='D')

The problem is that the nargs='+' causes the optional to consume all the arguments following it, even though we should know that we need to save one for the final positional argument.

A workaround is to specify '--', e.g.:

>>> parser.parse_args('--badger A B C -- D'.split())
Namespace(badger=['A', 'B', 'C'], spam='D')

The problem arises from the fact that argparse uses regular-expression style matching for positional arguments, but it does that separately from what it does for optional arguments.

One solution might be to build a regular expression of the possible things a parser could match. So given a parser like::

  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
  parser.add_argument('-w')
  parser.add_argument('-x', nargs='+')
  parser.add_argument('y')
  parser.add_argument('z', nargs='*')

the regular expression might look something like (where positionals have been replaced by the character A)::

  (-w A)? (-x A+)? A (-w A)? (-x A+)? A* (-w A)? (-x A+)?

Note that the optionals can appear between any positionals, so I have to repeat their regular expressions multiple times. Because of this, I worry about how big the regular expression might grow to be for large parsers. But maybe this is the right way to solve the problem.

----------
messages: 111270
nosy: bethard
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: argparse optionals with nargs='+' can't be followed by positionals
type: feature request

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue9338>
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