Python Argparse conditionally required arguments

by

I’ve been searching for a simple answer to this kind of question for some time. All you need to do is check if '--argument' is in sys.argv, so basically for your code sample you could just do:

import argparse
import sys

if __name__ == '__main__':
    p = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='...')
    p.add_argument('--argument', required=False)
    p.add_argument('-a', required='--argument' in sys.argv) #only required if --argument is given
    p.add_argument('-b', required='--argument' in sys.argv) #only required if --argument is given
    args = p.parse_args()

This way required receives either True or False depending on whether the user as used --argument. Already tested it, seems to work and guarantees that -a and -b have an independent behavior between each other.

More Related Contents:

  1. Parsing boolean values with argparse
  2. How can I pass a list as a command-line argument with argparse?
  3. Simple argparse example wanted: 1 argument, 3 results
  4. Python argparse mutual exclusive group
  5. Can’t get argparse to read quoted string with dashes in it?
  6. Argparse optional positional arguments?
  7. How to insert newlines on argparse help text?
  8. Python argparse – Add argument to multiple subparsers
  9. Argparse: Required argument ‘y’ if ‘x’ is present
  10. How do you write tests for the argparse portion of a python module?
  11. Python argparse ignore unrecognised arguments
  12. Python argparse: default value or specified value
  13. Argparse with required subparser
  14. argparse subparser monolithic help output
  15. Display help message with Python argparse when script is called without any arguments
  16. How to open file using argparse?
  17. Specify date format for Python argparse input arguments
  18. Why use argparse rather than optparse?
  19. Setting options from environment variables when using argparse
  20. Accepting a dictionary as an argument with argparse and python [duplicate]
  21. Conditional command line arguments in Python using argparse
  22. argparse – disable same argument occurrences
  23. Python argparse command line flags without arguments
  24. Customize argparse help message
  25. type=dict in argparse.add_argument()
  26. Python argparse: Is there a way to specify a range in nargs?
  27. argparse argument order
  28. argparse subcommands with nested namespaces
  29. How can I constrain a value parsed with argparse (for example, restrict an integer to positive values)?
  30. Using the same option multiple times in Python’s argparse

Leave a Comment