[issue43160] argparse: add extend_const action

[Tony Lykke]

Tony Lykke <hi at tonylykke.com> added the comment:

Perhaps the example I added to the docs isn't clear enough and should be changed because you're right, that specific one can be served by store_const. Turns out coming up with examples that are minimal but not too contrived is hard! Let me try again with a longer example that hopefully shows more clearly how the existing action's behaviours differ from my patch.

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument("--foo", action="append", default=[])
    parser.add_argument("--append", action="append_const", dest="foo", const=["a", "b"])
    parser.add_argument("--store", action="store_const", dest="foo", const=["a", "b"])

When run on master the following behaviour is observed:

    --foo a --foo b --foo c
            Namespace(foo=['a', 'b', 'c'])
    --foo c --append
            Namespace(foo=['c', ['a', 'b']])
    --foo c --store
            Namespace(foo=['a', 'b'])
    --store --foo a
            Namespace(foo=['a', 'b', 'c'])

If we then add the following:

    parser.add_argument("--extend", action="extend_const", dest="foo", const=["a", "b"])

and then run it with my patch the following can be observed:

    --foo c --extend
            Namespace(foo=['c', 'a', 'b'])
    --extend --foo c
            Namespace(foo=['a', 'b', 'c'])

store_const is actually a pretty close fit, but the way it makes order significant (specifically in that it will silently drop prev values) seems like it'd be rather surprising to users and makes it a big enough footgun for this use case that I don't think it's a satisfactory alternative.

> I suspect users of your addition will get a surprise if they aren't careful to provide a list or tuple 'const'

I did consider that, but I don't think they'd get any more of a surprise than for doing the same with list.extend vs list.append.

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue43160>
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