argparse help without duplicate ALLCAPS

Question

I'd like to display argparse help for my options the same way the default -h,--help and -v,--version are, without the ALLCAPS text after the option, or at least without the duplicated CAPS.

import argparse p = argparse.ArgumentParser("a foo bar dustup") p.add_argument('-i', '--ini', help="use alternate ini file") print '\n', p.parse_args() 

This is what I currently get with python foobar.py -h:

usage: a foo bar dustup [-h] [-i INI]  optional arguments:   -h, --help            show this help message and exit   -i INI, --ini INI     use alternate ini 

And this is what I want:

usage: a foo bar dustup [-h] [-i INI]  optional arguments:   -h, --help            show this help message and exit   -i, --ini INI         use alternate ini 

This would be acceptable too:

  -i, --ini             use alternate ini 

I'm using python 2.7.

Answer 1

You could customize usage and assign metavar to an empty string:

import argparse  p = argparse.ArgumentParser("a foo bar dustup", usage='%(prog)s [-h] [-i INI]') p.add_argument('-i', '--ini', help="use alternate ini file", metavar='') p.print_help() 

Output

 usage: a foo bar dustup [-h] [-i INI]  optional arguments:   -h, --help   show this help message and exit   -i , --ini   use alternate ini file 

Answer 2

Well from what I can tell you have two options,

import argparse  p = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="a foo bar dustup") p.add_argument('-i', '--ini', metavar='', help="use alternate ini file")  print '\n', p.parse_args() 

or you can write a custom formatter class, I realize the first option may not be a perfect solution, as it gets rid of the CAPS in the usage line. If it's that important here is the source for argparse, from what I can tell the default formatter classes won't do exactly what you want.

Edit:

Well I went ahead and built you your own formatter class, in the same fashion as the others... not sure I'd recommend you using this in production code as there won't be any official python documentation for it =P

import argparse from argparse import HelpFormatter  class MyFormatter(HelpFormatter):     """         for matt wilkie on SO     """      def _format_action_invocation(self, action):         if not action.option_strings:             default = self._get_default_metavar_for_positional(action)             metavar, = self._metavar_formatter(action, default)(1)             return metavar          else:             parts = []              # if the Optional doesn't take a value, format is:             #    -s, --long             if action.nargs == 0:                 parts.extend(action.option_strings)              # if the Optional takes a value, format is:             #    -s ARGS, --long ARGS             else:                 default = self._get_default_metavar_for_optional(action)                 args_string = self._format_args(action, default)                 for option_string in action.option_strings:                     parts.append(option_string)                  return '%s %s' % (', '.join(parts), args_string)              return ', '.join(parts)      def _get_default_metavar_for_optional(self, action):         return action.dest.upper()  p = argparse.ArgumentParser("a foo bar dustup", formatter_class=MyFormatter) p.add_argument('-i', '--ini', help="use alternate ini file") p.print_help()