Conditional command line arguments in Python using argparse

Question

I\'d like to have a program that takes a --action= flag, where the valid choices are dump and upload, with upload being t

Answer 1

It depends what you consider "doing all the logic yourself". You can still use argparse and add the dump option as follows with minimal effort without resorting to sub-commands:

from argparse import ArgumentParser
from sys import argv

parser = ArgumentParser()
action_choices = ['upload', 'dump']
parser.add_argument('--action', choices=action_choices, default=action_choices[1])
parser.add_argument('--dump-format', required=(action_choices[1] in argv))

This way argparse won't care about the dump format if the dump action wasn't selected