Question

I’d like to have a program that takes a --action= flag, where the valid choices are dump and upload, with upload being the default. If (and only if) dump is selected, I’d like there to also be a --dump-format= option. Is there a way to express this using argparse, or do I need to just accept all the arguments and do the logic myself.

Answer 1

You could use parser.error:

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--action', choices=['upload', 'dump'], default='dump')
parser.add_argument('--dump-format')
args = parser.parse_args()
if args.action != 'dump' and args.dump_format:
    parser.error('--dump-format can only be set when --action=dump.')