How do I format positional argument help using Python's optparse?

Posted by cdleary on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by cdleary
Published on 2009-03-13T13:16:56Z Indexed on 2010/04/24 17:23 UTC
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Filed under:

python

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optparse

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command-line-arguments

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formatting

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command-line

As mentioned in the docs the optparse.OptionParser uses an IndentedHelpFormatter to output the formatted option help, for which which I found some API documentation.

I want to display a similarly formatted help text for the required, positional arguments in the usage text. Is there an adapter or a simple usage pattern that can be used for similar positional argument formatting?

Clarification

Preferably only using the stdlib. Optparse does great except for this one formatting nuance, which I feel like we should be able to fix without importing whole other packages. :-)

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