I've begun writing a program with an interactive prompt, and it needs to parse
input from the user. I thought the argparse module would be
great for this, but unfortunately it insists on calling sys.exit() at any sign
of trouble instead of letting its ArgumentError exception
propagate so that I can handle it. Overriding ArgumentParser.error doesn't
really help since methods like parse_known_args just send a
message to be relayed to the user as an argument after swallowing ArgumentError
(which does have useful information in its attributes). If I
wanted to figure out what actually caused the exception to be raised, I'd have
to parse the message, which is ugly at best. I understand
that most people do want argparse to just display a message and terminate if
the arguments supplied aren't useful, but there's a lot of
potential in the module that is crippled outside the main use case. I have to
wonder why a module that is meant to be imported would ever
call sys.exit(), even if that is what the caller would normally do if presented
with an exception.
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CPython 3.3.2 | Windows NT 6.2.9200 / FreeBSD 9.1
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