Edit: Please see quornian's answer to this question, which is better than mine and should be the accepted answer.
According to the argparse documentation the result of parser.parse_args(...)
will "only contain attributes for the main parser and the sub parser that was selected". Unfortunately this may not be enough information to determine which sub parser was used. The documentation recommends using the set_defaults(...)
method on the sub parser to solve this problem.
For example, I've added calls to set_defaults()
to your code:
import argparse parser = argparse.ArgumentParser( version='pyargparsetest 1.0' ) subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(help='commands') # all all_parser = subparsers.add_parser('all', help='process all apps') all_parser.set_defaults(which='all') # app app_parser = subparsers.add_parser('app', help='process a single app') app_parser.add_argument('appname', action='store', help='name of app to process') app_parser.set_defaults(which='app')
Now if you run
print parser.parse_args(["all"])
The result is
Namespace(which='all')
Check out the add_subparsers()
documentation for more information and another example.