I use the following simple code to parse some arguments; note that one of them is required. Unfortunately, when the user runs the script without providing the argument, the displayed usage/help text does not indicate that there is a non-optional argument, which I find very confusing. How can I get python to indicate that an argument is not optional?

Here is the code:

import argparse
if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description='Foo')
    parser.add_argument('-i','--input', help='Input file name', required=True)
    parser.add_argument('-o','--output', help='Output file name', default="stdout")
    args = parser.parse_args()
    print ("Input file: %s" % args.input )
    print ("Output file: %s" % args.output )

When running above code without providing the required argument, I get the following output:

usage: foo.py [-h] -i INPUT [-o OUTPUT]

Foo

optional arguments:
    -h, --help            show this help message and exit
    -i INPUT, --input INPUT
                          Input file name
    -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                          Output file name

7 Answers
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