Distinguishing subparser arguments

Question

Ok so If I have a parser like this

example = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='main parser')
example.add_argument('Kill')

subexample = example.add_subparsers()
person = subexample.add_parser('who')
person.add_argument('name')
person.add_argument('address')
animal = subexample.add_parser('what')
animal.add_argument('name')

args = parser.parse_args()

If I use args.name(), what is it going to give me? How can I specify which name I actually want? args.animal.name()? I am unsure, please help. And by the way I don't support killing animals I just didn't have many creative example I could think of.

Answer 1

Use set_defaults:

import argparse

example = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='main parser')
example.add_argument('Kill')

subexample = example.add_subparsers()
person = subexample.add_parser('who')
person.add_argument('name')
person.add_argument('address')
person.set_defaults(kind = 'person')

animal = subexample.add_parser('what')
animal.add_argument('name')
animal.set_defaults(kind = 'animal')
args = example.parse_args()
print(args)

Running yields

% test.py 1 who bar baz
Namespace(Kill='1', address='baz', kind='person', name='bar')
% test.py 1 what foo
Namespace(Kill='1', kind='animal', name='foo')
17:31:52 cyrano@farmer:~/test% 

Answer 2

As you can see in documentation, there is dest argument to add_subparsers(). This argument tells in which variable name of the subparser must be stored.

If you use in your code:

subexample = example.add_subparsers(dest='parser_name')

Then, after parsing arguments you can use them as:

if args.parser_name == 'who':
    pass
elif args.parser_name == 'what':
    pass