I have converted from OptionParser to ArgumentParser (new in version 2.7) to great advantage, and I think it's a great improvement! But now I want to customize the help formatting just a bit.
The documentation is sketchy here, but I started by subclassing ArgumentParser and attempted to redefine format_usage, but after looking at the detailed instructions with pydoc I see "the API of the formatter objects is still considered an implementation detail." I take that to mean I should abandon such efforts at the moment. So, using the defined class as is, and following instructions in the online docs, I have been able to get my output to look like this: ==============> $ test_argparser.py -h usage: test_argparser.py [options] A program to manipulate user programs. optional arguments: -h, --help Show this help message and exit. -v, --version Show program's version number and exit. -s, --show Show a list of user post-processing programs. Version 2010-08-20.01 <============== To beautify things I would like to change two strings which are auto-generated by the standard parser: 1. change "usage:" to "Usage:" # capitalize 'usage' 2. change "optional arguments:" to "Optional arguments:" # capitalize 'Optional' Does anyone know how to do it without modifying source code? Thanks, -Tom Thomas M. Browder, Jr. Niceville, Florida USA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
