Why is the argparse module so inflexible?

[Jason Swails]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

>
> If the OP is writing an interactive shell, shouldn't `cmd` be used instead
> of `argparse`?  argparse is, after all, intended for argument parsing of
> command line scripts, not for interactive work.
>

He _is_ using cmd.  He's subclassed cmd.Cmd and trying to use argparse to
handle argument parsing in the Cmd.precmd method to preprocess the user
input.

Let's say that one of the user's commands requires an integer but they give
a float or a string by accident: I believe the OP wants ArgumentParser to
pass the appropriate ArgumentError exception up to the calling routine
rather than catching it and calling ArgumentParser.error(), thereby
destroying information about the exception type and instead requiring him
to rely on parsing the far less reliable error message (since it's
reasonable to expect that kind of thing to change from version to version).
 This way his calling routine can indicate to the user what was wrong with
the last command and soldier on without bailing out of the program (or
doing something ugly like catching a SystemExit and parsing argparse's
error message).

As it stands now, ArgumentParser has only limited utility in this respect
since all parsing errors result in a SystemExit exception being thrown.
 Having subclassed cmd.Cmd myself in one of my programs and written my own
argument parsing class to service it, I can appreciate what the OP is
trying to do (and it's clever IMO).  While argparse was not specifically
designed for what the OP is trying to do, it would satisfy his needs nicely
except for the previously mentioned issue.

An alternative is, of course, to simply subclass ArgumentParser and copy
over all of the code that catches an ArgumentError to eliminate the
internal exception handling and instead allow them to propagate the call
stack.

All the best,
Jason
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