[New-bugs-announce] [issue13023] argparse should allow displaying argument default values in addition to setting a formatter class

[Denilson Figueiredo de Sá]

New submission from Denilson Figueiredo de Sá <denilsonsa at gmail.com>:

In my script, I wanted two things at the same time:
1. Setting a formatter class so that the epilog would have the line breaks preserved.
2. Telling argparse to automatically display default values for all arguments.

Currently, both things are handled by the same configuration parameter: formatter_class
This means we can either pass argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter or argparse.ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter, but not both.

I did a hackish workaround by subclassing both formatters, and passing my (empty) subclass to ArgumentParser. It works for now, but it might break on future versions.

The ideal solution, however, would have a native support for both features, or at least explicitly allowing subclassing.
Maybe ArgumentDefaultsHelpFormatter could be transformed into a simple boolean parameter passed to ArgumentParser object (and maybe also passed to add_argument() method), instead of being a formatter class.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 144354
nosy: denilsonsa
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: argparse should allow displaying argument default values in addition to setting a formatter class
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue13023>
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