Argparse Utils (tddschn)

Utilities for dynamically removing or renaming argparse arguments without rewriting the original CLI definition.

Features

• Remove an option (including from mutually exclusive groups) by dest or option string.
• Replace an argument's option strings atomically with conflict detection.

Installation

pip install argparse-utils-tddschn

Usage

import argparse
from argparse_utils import remove_argument, replace_argument_names

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-c", "--config")
parser.add_argument("--dry-run", action="store_true")

remove_argument(parser, "--dry-run")
replace_argument_names(parser, "--config", ["-C", "--configuration"])

Presetting Arguments

Sometimes you want to provide default argument values programmatically, for example when centralizing configuration or writing tests. The preset_arguments helper lets you do this by pretending the supplied tokens were passed on the command line.

Important points:

• Provide a sequence of tokens (not a single string) such as ['--config', 'foo.ini', '--dry-run'].
• Flags and value-style options are supported; positional arguments are supported too.
• Unknown tokens will raise a ValueError.
• If you pass a raw string instead of a token sequence, a TypeError is raised.
• Presets are applied as parser defaults using parser.set_defaults(...), so actual CLI values still override them.

Example:

from argparse import ArgumentParser
from argparse_utils import preset_arguments

parser = ArgumentParser(prog="prog")
parser.add_argument("-c", "--config")
parser.add_argument("--dry-run", action="store_true")

# Pretend the user passed these on the command line
preset_arguments(parser, ["--config", "foo.ini", "--dry-run"])

args = parser.parse_args([])
assert args.config == "foo.ini"
assert args.dry_run is True

# CLI still wins over preset
args = parser.parse_args(["--config", "bar.ini"])
assert args.config == "bar.ini"
assert args.dry_run is True

Development

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]
pytest

License

MIT