How to have sub-parser arguments in separate namespace with argparse?

Question

I have the following test-code

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument(\"--verbose\", default = 0, type=int)

subparsers = par         


        

Answer 1

I have started to develop a different approach (but similar to the suggestion by Anthon) and come up with a much shorter code. However, I am not sure my approach is a general solution for the problem.

To similar what Anthon is proposing, I define a new method which creates a list of 'top-level' arguments which are kept in args, while all the other arguments are returned as an additional dictionary:

class MyArgumentParser(argparse.ArgumentParser):
    def parse_subargs(self, *args, **kw):
        # parse as usual
        args = argparse.ArgumentParser.parse_args(self, *args, **kw)

        # extract the destination names for top-level arguments
        topdest = [action.dest for action in parser._actions]

        # loop over all arguments given in args
        subargs = {}
        for key, value in args.__dict__.items():

            # if sub-parser argument found ...
            if key not in topdest:

                # ... remove from args and add to dictionary
                delattr(args,key)
                subargs[key] = value

        return args, subargs

Comments on this approach welcome, especially any loopholes I overlooked.