argparse argument order

This is a bit fragile since it relies on understanding the internals of argparse.ArgumentParser, but in lieu of rewriting argparse.ArgumentParser.parse_known_args, here's what I use:

class OrderedNamespace(argparse.Namespace):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        self.__dict__["_arg_order"] = []
        self.__dict__["_arg_order_first_time_through"] = True
        argparse.Namespace.__init__(self, **kwargs)

    def __setattr__(self, name, value):
        #print("Setting %s -> %s" % (name, value))
        self.__dict__[name] = value
        if name in self._arg_order and hasattr(self, "_arg_order_first_time_through"):
            self.__dict__["_arg_order"] = []
            delattr(self, "_arg_order_first_time_through")
        self.__dict__["_arg_order"].append(name)

    def _finalize(self):
        if hasattr(self, "_arg_order_first_time_through"):
            self.__dict__["_arg_order"] = []
            delattr(self, "_arg_order_first_time_through")

    def _latest_of(self, k1, k2):
        try:
            print self._arg_order
            if self._arg_order.index(k1) > self._arg_order.index(k2):
                return k1
        except ValueError:
            if k1 in self._arg_order:
                return k1
        return k2

This works through the knowledge that argparse.ArgumentParser.parse_known_args runs through the entire option list once setting default values for each argument. Meaning that user specified arguments begin the first time __setattr__ hits an argument that it's seen before.

Usage:

options, extra_args = parser.parse_known_args(sys.argv, namespace=OrderedNamespace())

You can check options._arg_order for the order of user specified command line args, or use options._latest_of("arg1", "arg2") to see which of --arg1 or --arg2 was specified later on the command line (which, for my purposes was what I needed: seeing which of two options would be the overriding one).

UPDATE: had to add _finalize method to handle pathological case of sys.argv() not containing any arguments in the list)

To keep arguments ordered, I use a custom action like this:

import argparse
class CustomAction(argparse.Action):
    def __call__(self, parser, namespace, values, option_string=None):
        if not 'ordered_args' in namespace:
            setattr(namespace, 'ordered_args', [])
        previous = namespace.ordered_args
        previous.append((self.dest, values))
        setattr(namespace, 'ordered_args', previous)
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--test1', action=CustomAction)
parser.add_argument('--test2', action=CustomAction)

To use it, for example:

>>> parser.parse_args(['--test2', '2', '--test1', '1'])
Namespace(ordered_args=[('test2', '2'), ('test1', '1')], test1=None, test2=None)

If you need to know the order in which the arguments appear in your parser, you can set up the parser like this:

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = "A cool application.")
parser.add_argument('--optional1')
parser.add_argument('positionals', nargs='+')
parser.add_argument('--optional2')

args = parser.parse_args()
print args.positionals

Here's a quick example of running this code:

$ python s.py --optional1 X --optional2 Y 1 2 3 4 5
['1', '2', '3', '4', '5']

Note that args.positionals is a list with the positional arguments in order. See the argparse documentation for more information.