[Python-Dev] PEP 389: argparse - new command line parsing module (original) (raw)

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 17:49:15 CEST 2009

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:27 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:28:39 am Steven Bethard wrote:

* Would you like argparse to grow an addgetoptarguments method (as in my other post)? 0

* If argparse grew an addgetoptarguments, would you still want to keep getopt around? And if so, why? Simplicity of the learning curve. Using it is as simple as: getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "a:b", ["alpha=", "beta"])

You forgot the for-loop, nested if/else statements and type conversions. ;-)

Does argparse allow anything as simple as that?

If you mean, does argparse allow configuration to be specified using the getopt style ("a:b", ["alpha=", "beta"]), no, it currently doesn't. But if this is useful functionality, and would reasonably replace the getopt use cases, then I'd be happy to add it. In the simplest version, we might add something like::

options, args = argparse.getopt("a:b", ["alpha=", "beta"])

where you could then use "options" without any looping::

alpha = options.a or options.alpha
beta = options.b or options.beta

But if people still like the traditional getopt loop with nested if/elses better, then we might as well just keep getopt around and not add anything to argparse. I'm fine with that too, I just want to make sure that there isn't an obvious deficiency in argparse that we could easily fix.

Steve

Where did you get that preposterous hypothesis? Did Steve tell you that? --- The Hiphopopotamus

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