Steven Bethard <steven.beth...@gmail.com> added the comment: > optparse, which argparse attempts to replace, permitted positional > arguments to be intermixed with optional arguments
Sure, but optparse didn't actually parse positional arguments - it just threw them into a bag, and then you had to group them and convert them however you wanted afterwards. Argparse, instead, was designed to let you specify the groups of positional arguments. Your situation is a little different because you just want to throw all the positional arguments into a bag again. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's just not the primary use case argparse had in mind. > The only definition of positional parameters I could find... Yeah, it looks like there's no good documentation on positional vs. optional parameters. Somewhere obvious, perhaps right at the beginning of the add_argument() documentation, there should probably be something like: Argparse groups the command line argument strings into two types of groups: optional arguments, which are a sequence of command line strings that begin with a flag like "-v" or "--verbose", and positional arguments, which are a sequence of command line strings that do not begin with a flag. The add_argument() method allows you to specify how many command line strings each of your optional or positional arguments should consume, how those strings should be converted into Python objects, etc. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue14191> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com