Edited to add: The best place to discuss this topic is on my original answer on StackOverflow.
I'm a fan of both the ConfigParser and argparse modules in my Python scripts and I've always thought it would be great to have a way to combine them. In other words allow the user of a script to provide a command line option that specified a configuration file that specified defaults for the command line options.
Recently I discovered the parse_known_args() method, which allows one to do just that.
Here's the script p.py that demonstrates this:
Here's a configuration file and a demonstration of how it works:
So this is what I was looking for, the caller can specify a configuration file with defaults, but override those defaults with more command line options.
There's only one problem, the help option only shows the configuration file option:
That's because the '-h' is processed by the parse_known_args() instead of the final parse_args(). The way to fix this is to create two ArgumentParsers and use the add_help parameter when creating first to suppress it from parsing -h:
Now help works like you would expect:
