allow arguments to optionals to have different names

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Currently, no matter how many arguments an optional takes, they're all
named the same::

  >>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='PROG', add_help=False)
  >>> parser.add_argument('-c', nargs=2, metavar='X')
  >>> parser.print_help()
  usage: PROG [-c X X]

  optional arguments:
    -c X X

It would be nice to have multiple names sometimes (e.g. "X Y" instead of "X
X" above).

Perhaps this could be achieved by allowing metavar to be a sequence as well
as a string. I'm a little nervous though about the typecheck necessary to
distinguish between strings and other sequences, and the fact that you'd
need to check that the length of the sequence and the nargs value matched.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by steven.b...@gmail.com on 28 Mar 2009 at 2:17

[GoogleCodeExporter]

You can provide a tuple for the metavar= parameter as of r29.

Original comment by steven.b...@gmail.com on 13 Jul 2009 at 12:35

• Changed state: Fixed