Overwrite help string

Question

Inside my project I'm mostly using docopt, but to overcome a limitation I'm switching to argparse for one function. However, for consistency I want to still print my own doc-string when I type -h or --help. Surprisingly I cannot find how to do that.

This doesn't work:

parser.add_argument('-h', '--help', action='help', default=argparse.SUPPRESS, help=__doc__)

as it gives

argparse.ArgumentError: argument -h/--help: conflicting option strings: -h, --help

But what do I have to put?

Does this answer your question? Using the same option multiple times in Python's argparse — Serial Lazer
– Serial Lazer, Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 10:48
@SerialLazer Thanks. I'm not sure... Or rather I don't think so. What I want to do it simply to pring something else when argparse would print the docstring, I don't want to add an option on top of it. But maybe I'm overlooking something? — Tom de Geus
– Tom de Geus, Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 10:51
--help is included by default; so that's why adding your own produces a conflict. There is a ArgumentParser parameter to turns off the automatic help argument. Specifying the help=__doc__ doesn't help since the just changes the help line in the conventional help display. It doesn't change the whole display. — hpaulj
– hpaulj, Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 18:05

Tom de Geus · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-17 11:07:47Z

I found that one solution is to overwrite the default print_help function, as follows:

import argparse class Parser(argparse.ArgumentParser): def print_help(self): print(__doc__) parser = Parser() parser.add_argument('-f', '--foo', required=False)

I think this the best. ipython accomplishes something similar by looking at sys.argv before using the argparse parser. In other words, it captures the help command first.

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