Why use argparse rather than optparse?

Question

I noticed that the Python 2.7 documentation includes yet another command-line parsing module. In addition to getopt and optparse we now have argparse.

Why has yet another command-line parsing module been created? Why should I use it instead of optparse? Are there new features that I should know about?

Answer 1

As of python 2.7, optparse is deprecated, and will hopefully go away in the future.

argparse is better for all the reasons listed on its original page (https://code.google.com/archive/p/argparse/):

• handling positional arguments
• supporting sub-commands
• allowing alternative option prefixes like + and /
• handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments
• producing more informative usage messages
• providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions

More information is also in PEP 389, which is the vehicle by which argparse made it into the standard library.