ArgumentParser epilog and description formatting in conjunction with ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter

Question

I'm using argparse to take in command line input and also to produce help text. I want to use ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter as the formatter_class, however this prevents me from also using RawDescriptionHelpFormatter which would allow me to add custom formatting to my description or epilog.

Is there a sensible method of achieving this aside from writing code to produce text for default values myself? According to the argparse docs, all internals of ArgumentParser are considered implementation details, not public API, so sub-classing isn't an attractive option.

Answer 1

I just tried a multiple inheritance approach, and it works:

class CustomFormatter(argparse.ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter, argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter):     pass  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='test\ntest\ntest.',                                  epilog='test\ntest\ntest.',                                  formatter_class=CustomFormatter) 

This may break if the internals of these classes change though.