argparse: Python command line parser

The argparse module provides an easy, declarative interface for creating command line tools, which knows how to:

• parse the arguments and flags from sys.argv
• convert arg strings into objects for your program
• format and print informative help messages
• and much more...

The argparse module improves on the standard library optparse module in a number of ways including:

• handling positional arguments
• supporting sub-commands
• allowing alternative option prefixes like + and /
• handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments
• producing more informative usage messages
• providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions

The argparse documentation gives some example code, explains how to use all these features, and provides some information on how to upgrade from optparse.

Note that besides the downloads available here, you can also just download the single argparse.py module from the repository.