Cross-argument validation in argparse

Question

I'm looking for a Pythonic way to validate arguments when their validation logically depends on the value(s) parsed from other argument(s).

Here's a simple example:

parser.add_argument(
    '--animal', 
    choices=['raccoon', 'giraffe', 'snake'], 
    default='raccoon',
)
parser.add_argument(
    '--with-shoes', 
    action='store_true',
)

In this case, parsing this command should cause an error:

my_script.py --animal snake --with-shoes

Adding a mutually exclusive group doesn't seem to help here, as the other combos are OK:

my_script.py --animal raccoon --with-shoes
my_script.py --animal raccoon
my_script.py --animal snake
my_script.py --animal giraffe --with-shoes
my_script.py --animal giraffe

The validation error should ideally not be tied to --animal argument nor to --with-shoes argument, since the interface can not tell you which value needs to change here. Each value is valid, yet they can't be used in combination.

We can do this with post-processing the args namespace, but I'm looking for a solution which would cause the parser.parse_args() call to fail, i.e. we actually fail during argument parsing, not afterwards.

Answer 1

Checking values after parsing is simplest. You can even use parser.error('...') to produce an error message in the standard argparse format.

argparse handles each argument independently, and tries to do so in a way that doesn't care about the order (except for positionals). Each input value is added to the args namespace by the corresponding Action object (its __call__ method). A default store action simply uses setattr(args, dest, value); a store_true does setattr(args, dest, True).

Mutually exclusive groups are handled by keeping a set of seen_actions, and checking that against the group's own list of Actions. I've explored generalizing the groups to allow for other logical combinations of actions. As complicated as that has gotten (especially when displaying the usage), I didn't envisage testing for values as well as occurrence.

It would be possible to write custom Action classes, that check for co-occurrence, but that gets more complicated.

We could give with-shoes an Action class that checks the values of the args.animal attribute, and raises an error if that value is snake. But what if the user provides the with-shoes option first? We'd have to give animal a custom class that checks the args.with_shoes value, and raise an error if that is True, etc. So shoes has to know about animals and animals has to know about shoes. Testing after parsing allows you to put the logic in one place.

One of the big advantages to using a parser like argparse is it generates the usage, help, and error messages for you. But validation logic like this is hard to express automatically. As it is, the usage formatting for the relatively simple mutually-exclusive logic is brittle and easily broken.

An earlier attempt at answering this kind of question:

Parameter dependencies in Python - can't make it work