How to suppress only the long form of an argument in the argparse help output?

Question

When I'm using argparse, as an example like this:

from argparse import ArgumentParser
parser = ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-i", "--input", action="store")

then the help menu is like this:

usage: test.py [-h] [-i INPUT]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INPUT, --input INPUT
                        input file

What should I do if I don't want the --input INPUT here? Like this:

usage: test.py [-h] [-i INPUT]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INPUT              input file

Answer 1

You could have two options with the same destination attribute, and use argparse.SUPPRESS to suppress the help text for one of them.

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-i", dest="input", action="store")
parser.add_argument("--input", dest="input", action="store", help=argparse.SUPPRESS)