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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T15:22:07+00:00

I noticed that the Python 2.7 documentation includes yet another command-line parsing module. In

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I noticed that the Python 2.7 documentation includes yet another command-line parsing module. In addition to getopt and optparse we now have argparse.

Why has yet another command-line parsing module been created? Why should I use it instead of optparse? Are there new features that I should know about?

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  1. Editorial Team

    As of python 2.7, optparse is deprecated, and will hopefully go away in the future.

    argparse is better for all the reasons listed on its original page (https://code.google.com/archive/p/argparse/):

    • handling positional arguments
    • supporting sub-commands
    • allowing alternative option prefixes like + and /
    • handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments
    • producing more informative usage messages
    • providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions

    More information is also in PEP 389, which is the vehicle by which argparse made it into the standard library.

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