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[Python-Dev] PEP 389: argparse - new command line parsing module

Robert Kern robert.kern at gmail.com
Sat Oct 3 23:21:46 CEST 2009 
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Oct 2009 04:46:19 am Yuvgoog Greenle wrote:
> 
>> I just think that if a parser error is causing the SystemExit, I
>> would rather catch a parser error than catching a SystemExit for the
>> sake of readability. It saves me the comments:
>>
>> # Catching SystemExit because parse_args() throws SystemExit on
>> parser errors.
> 
> But why are you catching the error? As a general rule, you *want* your 
> command line app to exit if it can't understand the arguments you pass 
> to it. What else can it do? Guess what you wanted?

There are uses of argparse outside of command line apps. For example, I use it 
to parse --options for IPython %magic commands. Of course, I just subclass 
ArgumentParser and replace the .error() method. I require a particular IPython 
exception type in order for the error to be recognized correctly in the %magic 
subsystem.

The other use case, as mentioned earlier, was for debugging your parser on the 
interactive prompt. A custom subclass may also be able to hold more 
machine-readable information about the error than the formatted error message, 
but I don't have any particular use cases about what may be the most useful.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco
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