python argparse action example

Certainly! The argparse module in Python is a powerful and flexible tool for parsing command-line arguments. One of the key features of argparse is the ability to specify actions for arguments, allowing you to define how the parsed values should be handled. In this tutorial, we'll explore the action parameter in argparse and provide a code example.
The argparse module provides a way to parse command-line arguments in a systematic and user-friendly manner. It generates help and usage messages and issues errors when users give the program invalid arguments.
The action parameter in argparse allows you to specify what should happen when a particular argument is encountered. It determines how the argument value should be processed and stored.
Let's consider a simple example where we want to implement a script that adds two numbers together. We'll use the action parameter to specify that the argument should be treated as a number and perform the addition.
We create an ArgumentParser object and define two positional arguments (number1 and number2) representing the numbers to be added.
We introduce a --add optional argument with action="store_true". This means that if the --add flag is present, the add attribute in the args namespace will be True.
In the main function, we use parse_args() to parse the command-line arguments.
Based on the presence of the --add flag, we either print a message indicating no action or call the add_numbers function to perform the addition.
This will output:
In this tutorial, we covered the basics of using the action parameter in argparse to define custom actions for command-line arguments. The provided example demonstrates how to perform different actions based on the presence of an optional flag. This is just a simple illustration, and argparse provides various built-in actions and customization options for handling arguments in more complex scenarios.
ChatGPT