argparse-formatter 1.1

Paragraph-preserving formatter for argparse

Argparse Paragraph Formatter

This project is a Python module that provides an argparse formatter that preserves paragraphs in help and epilog text.

Background

By default, argparse will collapse and transform all sequences of whitespace into a single space, and then wrap the text to an appropriate line length. This causes all text to be transformed into a single paragraph.

There are optional RawDescriptionHelpFormatter and RawTextHelpFormatter classes that can be used to preserve paragraphs, but they do not perform any word wrapping.

The ParagraphFormatter

This module provides the ParagraphFormatter class. If this class is passed to the argparse.ArgumentParser creation call as the formatter_class argument, then help and epilog paragraphs, separated by single blank lines, will be preserved. Word wrapping will be performed within the paragraphs.

Note that ParagraphFormatter is implemented by overriding two private methods in the default argparse formatter, and that the internals of that class are not considered part of the argparse API. There is therefore a small risk that the code may break with a future standard library release. The module has been tested across Python versions.

Demo

The script demo.py demonstrates the effect of using the ParagraphFormatter:

# ./demo.py
*************************
Using the Default formatter
*************************

usage: demo.py [-h] [--arg ARG]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --arg ARG   This same feature would be useful for arguments that would
              benefit from more explanation. Wouldn't it?

This is a multi-paragraph epilog. It is presenting data that would benefit by
being visually broken up into pieces. It sure would be nice if it was
represented that way.


*************************
Using the Paragraph formatter
*************************

usage: demo.py [-h] [--arg ARG]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --arg ARG   This same feature would be useful for arguments that would
              benefit from more explanation.
          
              Wouldn't it?

This is a multi-paragraph epilog. It is presenting data that would benefit by
being visually broken up into pieces.

It sure would be nice if it was represented that way.

Install

Install from PyPi with:

pip install argparse-paragraph