[issue9849] Argparse needs better error handling for nargs

[Jason Baker]

New submission from Jason Baker <amnorvend at gmail.com>:

This is referring to argparse 1.1 installed under Python 2.6.  When I was passing in an nargs flag, I figured that since '+' and '*' are valid options, I should pass in strings.  So when I tried passing in the string '1' instead of the integer 1, I got the following error:


>>> import argparse

>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.add_argument('foo', nargs='1')
_StoreAction(option_strings=[], dest='foo', nargs='1', const=None, default=None, type=None, choices=None, help=None, metavar=None)

>>> parser.parse_args()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 1698, in parse_args
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 1730, in parse_known_args
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 1935, in _parse_known_args
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 1884, in consume_positionals
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 2028, in _match_arguments_partial
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/argparse.py", line 2169, in _get_nargs_pattern
TypeError: can't multiply sequence by non-int of type 'str'

Fortunately, I had just added the nargs and knew to correct that.  However, if I were to do something like read that value in from a config file and forget to coerce the value from a string to an int, I could see how this could be a giant pain to track down.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 116355
nosy: Jason.Baker
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Argparse needs better error handling for nargs
versions: Python 2.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue9849>
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