Check if argparse optional argument is set or not

Question

I would like to check whether an optional argparse argument has been set by the user or not.

Can I safely check using isset?

Something like this:

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Answer 1

If your argument is positional (ie it doesn't have a "-" or a "--" prefix, just the argument, typically a file name) then you can use the nargs parameter to do this:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Foo is a program that does things')
parser.add_argument('filename', nargs='?')
args = parser.parse_args()

if args.filename is not None:
    print('The file name is {}'.format(args.filename))
else:
    print('Oh well ; No args, no problems')