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

Very simple, after defining args variable by 'args = parser.parse_args()' it contains all data of args subset variables too. To check if a variable is set or no assuming the 'action="store_true" is used...

if args.argument_name:
   # do something
else:
   # do something else

Answer 2

As @Honza notes is None is a good test. It's the default default, and the user can't give you a string that duplicates it.

You can specify another default='mydefaultvalue, and test for that. But what if the user specifies that string? Does that count as setting or not?

You can also specify default=argparse.SUPPRESS. Then if the user does not use the argument, it will not appear in the args namespace. But testing that might be more complicated:

args.foo # raises an AttributeError
hasattr(args, 'foo')  # returns False
getattr(args, 'foo', 'other') # returns 'other'

Internally the parser keeps a list of seen_actions, and uses it for 'required' and 'mutually_exclusive' testing. But it isn't available to you out side of parse_args.

Answer 3

You can check an optionally passed flag with store_true and store_false argument action options:

import argparse

argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
argparser.add_argument('-flag', dest='flag_exists', action='store_true')

print argparser.parse_args([])
# Namespace(flag_exists=False)
print argparser.parse_args(['-flag'])
# Namespace(flag_exists=True)

This way, you don't have to worry about checking by conditional is not None. You simply check for True or False. Read more about these options in the docs here