Upgrading optparse code
Release 3.13.0
Guido van Rossum and the Python development team
October 19, 2024
Python Software Foundation
Email:
[email protected]Contents
Originally, the argparse module had attempted to maintain compatibility with optparse. However, optparse
was difficult to extend transparently, particularly with the changes required to support nargs= specifiers and better
usage messages. When most everything in optparse had either been copy-pasted over or monkey-patched, it no
longer seemed practical to try to maintain the backwards compatibility.
The argparse module improves on the optparse module in a number of ways 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.
A partial upgrade path from optparse to argparse:
• 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.
• 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>').
