Question

I’m using the argh library to create a python command line tool. Several of the names I’m using have turned out to be pretty long, e.g.:

./my_program.py download-and-parse-data --randomize-order --training-percent 80

Is there a simple way to allow abbreviations? For example, here’s a potential abbreviated version of the above line.

./my_program.py dpd -r -t 80

Ideally, I’d like to be able to use both command-line forms — the long, informative version, as well as the short, easy-to-type version. Is there a good way to do this?

Answer 1

You can do this quite easily with argparse‘s add_subparsers() method. See the docs here.

In your case It might break down to this:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
subs = parser.add_subparsers()
dpd = subs.add_parser('download-and-parse-data', aliases=['dpd'])
dpd.add_argument(...)
...

EDIT

In each add_argument() call you can also use multiple argument names. See docs here. E.g:

parser.add_argument('-f', '--foo')