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Python Academy · Lesson

Subcommands and Options

Build complex CLIs.

Why Subcommands?

Tools like git have subcommands: git add, git commit. argparse supports this through subparsers, where each subcommand has its own arguments.

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='tool')
sub = parser.add_subparsers(dest='command')
print('subparsers ready')

Adding Subparsers

add_subparsers returns an object whose add_parser method creates each subcommand. dest stores which one was chosen.

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
sub = parser.add_subparsers(dest='command')
sub.add_parser('start')
sub.add_parser('stop')
args = parser.parse_args(['start'])
print('command:', args.command)

All lessons in this course

  1. argparse Basics
  2. Subcommands and Options
  3. The Click Library
  4. Rich Terminal Output
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