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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Sep 30 18:38:50 CEST 2009

On a tangent -- a use case that I see happening frequently but which is pretty poorly supported by optparse is a command-line that has a bunch of general flags, then a 'subcommand name', and then more flags, specific to the subcommand. Most here are probably familiar with this pattern from SVN, Hg, and other revision control systems (P4 anyone?) with a rich command-line interface. There are some variants, e.g. whether global and subcommand-specific flags may overlap, and whether flags may follow positional args (Hg and SVN seem to differ here a bit).

I've helped write at least two tools at Google that have this structure; both used different approaches, and neither was particularly easy to get right. Getting all the different --help output to make sense was mostly a manual process. (E.g. "foo --help" should print the general flags and the list of known subcommands, whereas "foo --help subcommand" should print flags and other usage info about the specific subcommand.) Also switching out to different calls based on the subcommand should/might be part of this.

I would be willing to live with a third option parser in the stdlib if it solved this problem well.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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