Tom Browder wrote: > 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?
You can use internationalization via http://docs.python.org/library/gettext.html or take a shortcut: $ cat tmp.py lookup = { "usage: ": "Usage: ", "optional arguments": "Optional arguments"} def gettext(s): return lookup.get(s, s) import argparse argparse._ = gettext if __name__ == "__main__": p = argparse.ArgumentParser() p.parse_args() $ python tmp.py -h Usage: tmp.py [-h] Optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
