Why use argparse rather than optparse?

Question

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?

Answer 1

As per official Python document, optparse module is deprecated and they have stopped the development for this module.

There are various advantages that argparse have over optparse some of them are:

1. It is a flexible and powerful library for command-line parsing .

2. It allows prefixes like ‘+’ etc.

3. Handles positional arguments

4. It allows sub-commands

5. It has a much simpler interface for custom types and action.

 You can get more details about argparse here:https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0389/