The argparse module makes it easy to write user friendly command line interfaces.

The program defines what arguments it requires, and argparse will figure out how to parse those out of sys.argv. The argparse module also automatically generates help and usage messages and issues errors when users give the program invalid arguments.

As of Python >= 2.7 and >= 3.2, the argparse module is maintained within the Python standard library. For users who still need to support Python < 2.7 or < 3.2, it is also provided as a separate package, which tries to stay compatible with the module in the standard library, but also supports older Python versions.

Also, we can fix bugs here for users who are stuck on some non-current python version, like e.g. 3.2.3 (which has bugs that were fixed in a later 3.2.x release).

argparse is licensed under the Python license, for details see LICENSE.txt.

Compatibility

argparse should work on Python >= 2.3, it was tested on:

2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7
3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4

Installation

Try one of these:

python setup.py install

easy_install argparse

pip install argparse

putting argparse.py in some directory listed in sys.path should also work

Bugs

If you find a bug in argparse (pypi), please try to reproduce it with latest python 2.7 and 3.4 (and use argparse from stdlib).

If it happens there also, please file a bug in the python.org issue tracker. If it does not happen there, file a bug in the argparse package issue tracker.

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