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by wedn3sday 972 days ago
>> Flags with single character shortcuts can be easily combined—symbex -in fetch_data is short for symbex --imports --no-file fetch_data for example.

I pretty much use argparse for making all my CLI tools, but I dont know of an easy way of doing this single character flag thing. Is it possible/easy with argparse?
2 comments
jmholla 972 days ago
`argparse` does it by default:

    >>> import argparse
    >>> p = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    >>> p.add_argument("--foo", "-f", action="store_true")
    >>> p.add_argument("--bar", "-b")
    >>> p.parse_args(["-fb", "baz"])
    Namespace(foo=True, bar='baz')
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m463 972 days ago
I use argparse too, and it's one of the best python libraries (and my most-used)

you can do short (one character) or long arguments with argparse directly:

  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(argument_default=None)
  parser.add_argument('-d', '--debug', action='store_true', help='debug flag')
I also do lots of other things, like long help with no args like this:

  if len(sys.argv) == 1:
      parser.print_help(sys.stderr)
      sys.exit(1)
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