ArgumentParser.add_subparsers
- ArgumentParser.add_subparsers(*[, title][, description][, prog][, parser_class][, action][, dest][, required][, help][, metavar])
Many programs split up their functionality into a number of subcommands, for example, the svn program can invoke subcommands like svn checkout, svn update, and svn commit. Splitting up functionality this way can be a particularly good idea when a program performs several different functions which require different kinds of command-line arguments. ArgumentParser supports the creation of such subcommands with the add_subparsers() method. The add_subparsers() method is normally called with no arguments and returns a special action object. This object has a single method, add_parser(), which takes a command name and any ArgumentParser constructor arguments, and returns an ArgumentParser object that can be modified as usual.
© Python Software Foundation. PSF License Version 2 · Official docs ↗
Changed in 3.7, 3.14
- 3.7: New required keyword-only parameter.
- 3.14: Subparser’s prog is no longer affected by a custom usage message in the main parser.
1 Example
>>> # create the top-level parser >>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='PROG') >>> parser.add_argument('--foo', action='store_true', help='foo help') >>> subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(help='subcommand help') >>> >>> # create the parser for the "a" command >>> parser_a = subparsers.add_parser('a', help='a help') >>> parser_a.add_argument('bar', type=int, help='bar help') >>> >>> # create the parser for the "b" command >>> parser_b = subparsers.add_parser('b', help='b help') >>> parser_b.add_argument('--baz', choices=('X', 'Y', 'Z'), help='baz help') >>> >>> # parse some argument lists >>> parser.parse_args(['a', '12']) Namespace(bar=12, foo=False) >>> parser.parse_args(['--foo', 'b', '--baz', 'Z']) Namespace(baz='Z', foo=True)
from the Python docs