python argparse - either both optional arguments or else neither one

Question

I have a program that uses a default name and password. I\'m using argparse to allow the user to specify command line options, and I would like to enable the user to provid

Answer 1

I believe that the best way to handle this is to post-process the returned namespace. The reason that argparse doesn't support this is because it parses arguments 1 at a time. It's easy for argparse to check to see if something was already parsed (which is why mutually-exclusive arguments work), but it isn't easy to see if something will be parsed in the future.

A simple:

parser.add_argument('-n','--name',...,default=None)
parser.add_argument('-p','--password',...,default=None)
ns = parser.parse_args()

if len([x for x in (ns.name,ns.password) if x is not None]) == 1:
   parser.error('--name and --password must be given together')

name = ns.name if ns.name is not None else "default_name"
password = ns.password if ns.password is not None else "default_password"

seems like it would suffice.