Why does argparse return None instead of [] if an append action isn't used?

[Adam Funk]

On 2015-01-09, Skip Montanaro wrote:

>> I noticed in use that if an option with the 'append' action isn't
>> used, argparse assigns None to it rather than an empty list, &
>> confirmed this interactively:
>
> I don't use argparse (or optparse), being a getopt Luddite myself, but
> can you set the default for an action in the add_argument call?

Well, duh!  That works, thanks.  (I can't explain why I didn't think
of that.)


>>> import argparse
>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.add_argument('--foo', action='append',default=[])
_AppendAction(option_strings=['--foo'], dest='foo', nargs=None, const=None, default=[], type=None, choices=None, help=None, metavar=None)
>>> parser.add_argument('--bar', action='append',default=[])
_AppendAction(option_strings=['--bar'], dest='bar', nargs=None, const=None, default=[], type=None, choices=None, help=None, metavar=None)
>>> parser.parse_args('--foo 1 --foo 2'.split())
Namespace(bar=[], foo=['1', '2'])
>>> parser.parse_args('--foo 1 --bar 2'.split())
Namespace(bar=['2'], foo=['1'])
>>> parser.parse_args([])
Namespace(bar=[], foo=[])





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