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Howto Argparse Optparse

The document outlines the migration process from the optparse module to the argparse module in Python, highlighting the advantages of argparse such as handling positional arguments and supporting subcommands. It provides specific suggestions for developers on how to replace optparse functionalities with their argparse counterparts. Additionally, it emphasizes that applications currently satisfied with optparse can continue using it, while encouraging those considering migration to review the differences before proceeding.

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3 views

Howto Argparse Optparse

The document outlines the migration process from the optparse module to the argparse module in Python, highlighting the advantages of argparse such as handling positional arguments and supporting subcommands. It provides specific suggestions for developers on how to replace optparse functionalities with their argparse counterparts. Additionally, it emphasizes that applications currently satisfied with optparse can continue using it, while encouraging those considering migration to review the differences before proceeding.

Uploaded by

brunorafaeli
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Migrating optparse code to argparse

Release 3.13.2

Guido van Rossum and the Python development team

February 15, 2025


Python Software Foundation
Email: [email protected]

Contents

The argparse module offers several higher level features not natively provided by the optparse module, including:
• Handling positional arguments.
• Supporting subcommands.
• 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 type and action.
Originally, the argparse module attempted to maintain compatibility with optparse. However, the fundamental
design differences between supporting declarative command line option processing (while leaving positional argument
processing to application code), and supporting both named options and positional arguments in the declarative
interface mean that the API has diverged from that of optparse over time.
As described in choosing-an-argument-parser, applications that are currently using optparse and are happy with
the way it works can just continue to use optparse.
Application developers that are considering migrating should also review the list of intrinsic behavioural differences
described in that section before deciding whether or not migration is desirable.
For applications that do choose to migrate from optparse to argparse, the following suggestions should be helpful:
• Replace all optparse.OptionParser.add_option() calls with ArgumentParser.add_argument()
calls.
• Replace (options, args) = parser.parse_args() with args = parser.parse_args() and add
additional ArgumentParser.add_argument() calls for the positional arguments. Keep in mind that what
was previously called options, now in the argparse context is called args.
• Replace optparse.OptionParser.disable_interspersed_args() by using
parse_intermixed_args() instead of parse_args().
• Replace callback actions and the callback_* keyword arguments with type or action arguments.
• Replace string names for type keyword arguments with the corresponding type objects (e.g. int, float, complex,
etc).
• Replace optparse.Values with Namespace and optparse.OptionError and optparse.
OptionValueError with ArgumentError.

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• Replace strings with implicit arguments such as %default or %prog with the standard Python syntax to use
dictionaries to format strings, that is, %(default)s and %(prog)s.
• Replace the OptionParser constructor version argument with a call to parser.
add_argument('--version', action='version', version='<the version>').

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