TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'type' in argparse

Question

Hey so I'm using argparse to try and generate a quarterly report. This is what the code looks like:

parser  = argparse.ArgumentParser()  parser.add_argument('-q', "--quarter",  action='store_true', type=int, help="Enter a Quarter number: 1,2,3, or 4 ") parser.add_argument('-y', "--year", action='store_true',type=str,help="Enter a year in the format YYYY ") args = parser.parse_args() 

the error I receive is:

TypeError: init() got an unexpected keyword argument 'type'

as far as I can tell from the argparse documentation type is one of the parameters of the add_argument function. I tried removing this and updating the code to :

parser  = argparse.ArgumentParser()  parser.add_argument('-q', "--quarter",  action='store_true', help="Enter a Quarter number: 1,2,3, or 4 ") parser.add_argument('-y', "--year", action='store_true',help="Enter a year in the format YYYY ") args = parser.parse_args() 

I then tried to run it with: python scriptname.py -q 1 -y 2015 and it is giving me the following error:

error:unrecognized arguments: 1 2015

I don't know why that is either. Can anyone please shed some light on this.

Answer 1

What action="store_true" means is that if the argument is given on the command line then a True value should be stored in the parser. What you actually want is to store the given year (as a string) and quarter (as an int).

parser  = argparse.ArgumentParser()  parser.add_argument('-q', "--quarter", type=int, help="Enter a Quarter number: 1,2,3, or 4 ") parser.add_argument('-y', "--year", type=str, help="Enter a year in the format YYYY ") args = parser.parse_args() 

When you specify action='store_true argparse is internally instantiating a _StoreAction instance whose constructor does not accept a type parameter (since it will always be a boolean (True/False)). You cannot supply action="store_true" and 'type' at the same time.