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bpo-38678: Improve argparse example in tutorial (GH-17207) (GH-17213)
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(cherry picked from commit 04c79d6)

Co-authored-by: Raymond Hettinger <rhettinger@users.noreply.github.com>
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miss-islington and rhettinger committed Nov 18, 2019
1 parent 72321c7 commit d2faac6
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4 changes: 3 additions & 1 deletion Doc/library/argparse.rst
Expand Up @@ -778,10 +778,12 @@ how the command-line arguments should be handled. The supplied actions are:
example, this is useful for increasing verbosity levels::

>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.add_argument('--verbose', '-v', action='count')
>>> parser.add_argument('--verbose', '-v', action='count', default=0)
>>> parser.parse_args(['-vvv'])
Namespace(verbose=3)

Note, the *default* will be ``None`` unless explicitly set to *0*.

* ``'help'`` - This prints a complete help message for all the options in the
current parser and then exits. By default a help action is automatically
added to the parser. See :class:`ArgumentParser` for details of how the
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32 changes: 17 additions & 15 deletions Doc/tutorial/stdlib.rst
Expand Up @@ -72,21 +72,23 @@ three`` at the command line::
>>> print(sys.argv)
['demo.py', 'one', 'two', 'three']

The :mod:`argparse` module provides a mechanism to process command line arguments.
It should always be preferred over directly processing ``sys.argv`` manually.

Take, for example, the below snippet of code::

>>> import argparse
>>> from getpass import getuser
>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='An argparse example.')
>>> parser.add_argument('name', nargs='?', default=getuser(), help='The name of someone to greet.')
>>> parser.add_argument('--verbose', '-v', action='count')
>>> args = parser.parse_args()
>>> greeting = ["Hi", "Hello", "Greetings! its very nice to meet you"][args.verbose % 3]
>>> print(f'{greeting}, {args.name}')
>>> if not args.verbose:
>>> print('Try running this again with multiple "-v" flags!')
The :mod:`argparse` module provides a more sophisticated mechanism to process
command line arguments. The following script extracts one or more filenames
and an optional number of lines to be displayed::

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog = 'top',
description = 'Show top lines from each file')
parser.add_argument('filenames', nargs='+')
parser.add_argument('-l', '--lines', type=int, default=10)
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args)

When run at the command line with ``python top.py --lines=5 alpha.txt
beta.txt``, the script sets ``args.lines`` to ``5`` and ``args.filenames``
to ``['alpha.txt', 'beta.txt']``.


.. _tut-stderr:

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