Why use argparse rather than optparse?
I noticed that the Python 2.7 documentation includes yet another command-line parsing module. In addition to getopt and optparse we now have argparse.
Why has yet another command-line parsing module been created? Why should I use it instead of optparse? Are there new features that I should know about?
Answer
As of python 2.7, optparse is deprecated, and will hopefully go away in the future.
argparse is better for all the reasons listed on its original page (https://code.google.com/archive/p/argparse/):
- handling positional arguments
- supporting sub-commands
- 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 types and actions
More information is also in PEP 389, which is the vehicle by which argparse made it into the standard library.