Question

Optparse, the old version just ignores all unrecognised arguments and carries on. In most situations, this isn’t ideal and was changed in argparse. But there are a few situations where you want to ignore any unrecognised arguments and parse the ones you’ve specified.

For example:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--foo', dest="foo")
parser.parse_args()

$python myscript.py --foo 1 --bar 2
error: unrecognized arguments: --bar

Is there anyway to override this?

Answer 1

Replace

args = parser.parse_args()

with

args, unknown = parser.parse_known_args()

For example,

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--foo')
args, unknown = parser.parse_known_args(['--foo', 'BAR', 'spam'])
print(args)
# Namespace(foo='BAR')
print(unknown)
# ['spam']