Writing a help for python script

Question

I am trying to make my python script very user friendly, so I like to write some sort of help for it. I could just put in some logic that if the user passed help as a paramater to the script, they get help. Is there a best practise or convention for this?

Answer 1

You can use argparse.

For example, with test.py:

import argparse

parser=argparse.ArgumentParser(
    description='''My Description. And what a lovely description it is. ''',
    epilog="""All's well that ends well.""")
parser.add_argument('--foo', type=int, default=42, help='FOO!')
parser.add_argument('bar', nargs='*', default=[1, 2, 3], help='BAR!')
args=parser.parse_args()
Running

% test.py -h
yields

usage: test.py [-h] [--foo FOO] [bar [bar ...]]

My Description. And what a lovely description it is.

positional arguments:
  bar         BAR!

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --foo FOO   FOO!