Using the same option multiple times in Python's argparse

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I'm trying to write a script that accepts multiple input sources and does something to each one. Something like this

./my_script.py \
    -i input1_url input1_name input1_other_var \
    -i input2_url input2_name input2_other_var \
    -i input3_url input3_name
# notice inputX_other_var is optional

But I can't quite figure out how to do this using argparse. It seems that it's set up so that each option flag can only be used once. I know how to associate multiple arguments with a single option (nargs='*' or nargs='+'), but that still won't let me use the -i flag multiple times. How do I go about accomplishing this?

Just to be clear, what I would like in the end is a list of lists of strings. So

[["input1_url", "input1_name", "input1_other"],
 ["input2_url", "input2_name", "input2_other"],
 ["input3_url", "input3_name"]]
multiple-arguments argparse python
3 Answers

This is simple; just add both action='append' and nargs='*' (or '+').

import argparse
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('-i', action='append', nargs='+')
args = parser.parse_args()

Then when you run it, you get

In [32]: run test.py -i input1_url input1_name input1_other_var -i input2_url i
...: nput2_name input2_other_var -i input3_url input3_name

In [33]: args.i
Out[33]:
[['input1_url', 'input1_name', 'input1_other_var'],
 ['input2_url', 'input2_name', 'input2_other_var'],
 ['input3_url', 'input3_name']]
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