python argparse named positional arguments?

Question

Is there a way to make python's argparse.ArgumentParser treat command line arguments the way python functions treat arguments? So that arguments can be passed without their name?

Answer 1

See the example with "integers" in the documentation. Don't include any hyphens and the argument will be treated as a positional argument.

>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
>>> parser.add_argument('first_supplied_argument', help='help')
>>> parser.add_argument('second_supplied_argument', help='help')
>>> args = parser.parse_args(['1', '2'])
Namespace(first_supplied_argument='1', second_supplied_argument='2')

Edit based on comment:

Are you able to supply both positional and optional arguments? I think you will still need to supply at least one positional argument.

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--first', help='help')
parser.add_argument('first', nargs='?', help='help')
parser.add_argument('--second', help='help')
parser.add_argument('second', nargs='?', help='help')

print parser.parse_args(['1', '2'])
print parser.parse_args(['1', '--second', '2'])
print parser.parse_args(['--first', '1', '--second', '2'])  # doesn't work
print parser.parse_args(['', '--first', '1', '--second', '2'])  # probably not what you want to do

Output:

Namespace(first='1', second='2')
Namespace(first='1', second='2')
Namespace(first=None, second=None)  # doesn't work
Namespace(first='1', second='2')