Documentation

The documentation for several of argparse's actions could be improved to be shorter and clearer.

For specific examples:

'store_true' and 'store_false' - These are special cases of 'store_const' used for storing the values True and False respectively. In addition, they create default values of False and True respectively:

The In addition part is clunky.

'append_const' - This stores a list, and appends the value specified by the const keyword argument to the list; note that the const keyword argument defaults to None. The 'append_const' action is typically useful when multiple arguments need to store constants to the same list. For example:

This could be shorter.

'extend' - This stores a list and appends each item from the multi-value argument list to it. The 'extend' action is typically used with the nargs keyword argument value '+' or '*'. Note that when nargs is None (the default) or '?', each character of the argument string will be appended to the list. Example usage:

This sentence feels convoluted

'count' - This counts the number of times a keyword argument occurs. For example, this is useful for increasing verbosity levels:

The argument parsed by argparse is not specifically a keyword argument; this seems like a copy-paste error for the times it's referring to add_argument's args, as opposed to an argument parsed by argparse.

Linked PRs

• GH-141963: Clarify argparse documentation #141964
• [3.14] GH-141963: Clarify argparse documentation (GH-141964) #142076
• [3.13] GH-141963: Clarify argparse documentation (GH-141964) #142077