Having options in argparse with a dash

Question

I want to have some options in argparse module such as --pm-export however when I try to use it like args.pm-export I get the error that there is n

Answer 1

Unfortunately, dash-to-underscore replacement doesn't work for positionalarguments (not prefixed by --) like

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Process some integers.')
parser.add_argument('logs-dir',
                    help='Directory with .log and .log.gz files')
parser.add_argument('results-csv', type=argparse.FileType('w'),
                    default=sys.stdout,
                    help='Output .csv filename')
args = parser.parse_args()
print args

# gives
# Namespace(logs-dir='./', results-csv=)

So, you should use 1'st argument to add_argument() as attribute name and metavar kwarg to set how it should look in help:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Process some integers.')
parser.add_argument('logs_dir', metavar='logs-dir',
                    nargs=1,
                    help='Directory with .log and .log.gz files')
parser.add_argument('results_csv', metavar='results-csv',
                    nargs=1,
                    type=argparse.FileType('w'),
                    default=sys.stdout,
                    help='Output .csv filename')
args = parser.parse_args()
print args

# gives
# Namespace(logs_dir=['./'], results_csv=[])