I have a confession to make: I never remember how to use argparse. Maybe it’s because I don’t use it often enough to have how it works memorized, but I certainly use it often enough that I’m annoyed every time I have to look it up. Argparse? More like ARGHparse. Either way, I thought I would make a handy cheat sheet that can be quickly looked up rather than reading the documentation.
Read a single argument with a value
parser.add_argument('--id', type=int, nargs=1)
Read a single argument with a default
parser.add_argument('--id', type=int, nargs='?', default=0)
Read a flag (boolean) argument
parser.add_argument('--delete', nargs='?', const=True, default=False)
Read multiple arguments
parser.add_argument('--ids', type=int, nargs='+')
Required arguments
parser.add_argument('--id', type=int, nargs=1, required=True)
That should cover the common use cases, hope this has been helpful for someone other than me!
Top comments (1)
I like the use of
nargs=1which will mean your script always deals with lists and keep the code consistent, rather than leaving it out and having some lists and some strings or ints.nargs='?'andnargs='+'are new to me so thanks for them! I usenargs='*'a lot...